I’ll be okay when I have enough money.

 There will never be enough food.

I don’t have enough clothes. 

I don’t exercise enough.

I can’t get enough attention.

I will never be successful enough.

I am not hugged enough. 

What is enough? What would my world look like if I had enough money, food, clothes, exercise, attention, success, hugs?  

This world is impossible to imagine because it’s impossible to see. It would be like trying to take a photograph of the universe. My world of enough is endless. 

If you gave me a trillion dollars tomorrow, I bet I could spend it and enough to get me into debt by next Friday.

If you gave me six supermarkets full of food, I’d eat until I was stuffed and then cry because I felt so empty. 

If you gave me access to all the women’s clothing Nordstrom carries, I’d give each piece of clothing to friends until my arms fell off from the exhaustion of reaching out.  

If you hugged me until I was covered in sweat, I’d pass out from loneliness. 

If I won a Pulitzer for writing a book, I’d feel sick that I hadn’t won an Oscar, also. 

If I finished an Iron Man, I’d lie nearly dead in the grass and wonder how many pushups I needed to do to feel whole. 

If I was spotlit during half-time of the Super Bowl so the whole watching world could applaud as they looked at my face, I would feel like a kid out at Halloween. They like my costume! But they have no idea who I am! Boohoo!!!

I can’t imagine a task more thankless and heartbreaking than trying to make an adoptee feel satisfied. 

 You could not pay me to be an adoptive parent. It would be like trying to empty the ocean with an eye dropper. 

This is what I think: When I was inside my mother, her body and my body were one, and I stayed alive because I absorbed the nutrients and warmth that I needed from her through my skin and through the cord that connected us. I was porous, and I took and took and took until it was time for me to exit the building and enter the world as a separate being. 

When the cord is cut, the connection becomes a hole in my body that needs to be tied in a knot, and refuse from her body that needs to be disposed of. 

 My skin, still porous, still hungry for her skin, my lips and tongue newly hungry for her breast flesh, is wrapped in a blanket and carried away from itself (my body is still your body, even now, fifty-five years later), and so begins the drama of THE HUNGRY GHOST.

Watch your fingers and toes.

THE HUNGRY GHOST will eat them all.  

“I don’t live in a family that touches much,” a young adoptee told me. Later I found out that his mother devotes a minimum of an hour a night to back-rub time. He forgot to mention this part to me because he is A HUNGRY GHOST and HUNGRY GHOSTS don’t see what isn’t enough.  

Not enough is a form of death. My skin aches and does not feel right. It tells me something is wrong, and so I feel anxious, unsettled, empty, afraid. What can I get to settle myself? What can I eat to feel better? What can I buy to feel alive? Who can I get naked with to feel real? 

I have decided to make myself an ACCOUNTABLE HUNGRY GHOST. I am going to make a list of WHAT IS ENOUGH. Exactly how much money is enough? How much success? I can be a baby about it and say nothing is never enough, but that will lead to a frustrating life, and I want better for myself. I will hug myself with LIMITS. I will MAKE MYSELF SEE THAT I AM REALLY ALIVE AND THAT THIS IS REALLY MY LIFE AND I GET TO CHOOSE WHETHER I HAVE FUN OR NOT. 

But everything you wrote is true of almost all people! you say.

April Dinwoodie says that adopted people have a lot to teach the world. You can argue that what I wrote above is true for humans in general, and that we can all benefit from learning to establish the limits of our own needs, but I would counter-argue that the hungriness adopted people carry is fed by the body-belief that I WILL ACTUALLY DIE IF I DON’T GET THIS as opposed to non-adopted people who feel UNCOMFORTABLE with their unmet needs.

There is a link between adoption and lack of self-confidence. The infant body came into the world, unfinished, and was handed off before it was allowed to seal and become an independent being, a ship with an anchor. Adoptees often anchor themselves by throwing things into the black hole of loss, and the price is so very high.

It costs a lot to create a self out of what feels like nothing.

But I’m going to figure this stuff out. I know I can do better. Feel better.

I am sorry, Mom and Dad. I wish I had been easier.

I also wish you had been easier.

I am very clear that my many wild actions and habits are not all my fault, but I also like the feeling of being free to express exactly how I feel about being adopted WHILE being accountable for my actions. I am upset AND truthful.

My life has been so much better since I say what I think as opposed to what I think you want to hear.

I can’t get enough of it.

Life.