I am not adopted. But Anne is my mom, and she is adopted and so engaged in the active untangling of painful tendrils that adoption has woven through her life that I find myself believing I can construct some simulacrum of what adoption feels like. Even then, the vague idea that I have of what being adopted does to a person has always felt too profound and massive for me to really grasp.

Two months ago, I hit my head on my car. I wasn’t in a car wreck, my car didn’t have an evil Herbie­ sequence where it came to life and beat me up. I just missed the open part of the door when I was leaning in to get something. The resulting thunk was so loud that my partner heard it from across the yard, prompting an Oh my God, are you okay? At the time, I cried a tiny bit, laughed it off, and went on with my day and then my week. 

A week later I was in the hospital because of the pain in my head. Now, two months after that, my brain is still not healed, and my head still hurts.  

There are days now when I feel good. I laugh, I call family members and sit down to conversation-filled dinners with my partner. The laughter and conversations are hopeful, and my outlook on the future is bright. 

There are also days when I move from floor to bed to couch to chair in various prostrate positions, speaking in short sentences or not at all. On those days, my own thoughts are mostly quiet, or they are scared, or they beat with a rhythmic ow ow ow. On those days, I feel like the me that I’m just now learning to love has receded into a cave that lies deep, deep inside my brain. I have never been as lonely as I am on those days. 

I think that this is the closest I’ve come to understanding what it’s like to be adopted, as explained to me by my mom. On the bad days, it’s me against the world, and also me against my brain, which I perceive as an entity entirely separate from myself. It has needs and hurts that I can’t understand, no matter how many hours I spend asking What do you want? What will make you happy? 

Over the weeks, I’ve learned that there are two things that can help me on those bad days. One is receiving love. Even when we haven’t talked meaningfully all day, or when I’m a soggy mess of inexplicable tears, my partner tells me again and again that she loves me. My closest friend messages me every day, even when I don’t respond. She sends me pictures of her dog, her boyfriend, the cookies she’s baking. I feel her holding on to me from the real world, refusing to let me forget who I am and what I’m working so hard to try to get back to. My six-year-old cousin sends me voice messages that say things like “I miss you!” because he doesn’t know how to read or write yet. 

In the past, I’ve struggled with feeling burdensome in relationships. Well now, here I am, the most classically burdensome I’ve ever been. I can’t pretend that the love in my life is conditional, because I have little to offer these days and they love me nonetheless. I have had to abandon myself to the fact that there are people in my life who love me simply because I am. I’ve learned that it’s much harder to feel hopeless while also feeling loved unconditionally.

The other tool that I’ve relied on is writing. Right now, I’m writing this on the computer with my eyes closed. I can’t look at the screen for too long without feeling the concussion-hood lowering over the part of my brain that thinks and feels anything besides discomfort. I have had to abandon myself in this way, too. I used to write spasmodically, and then review what I had written with the cutting voice of self-doubt. Now, I don’t have time for doubt. The edits I can make can only be, for the sake of my tired brain, the simplest changes to illuminate meaning and encourage understanding. This process, too, sparks moments of hopefulness in me. Without the time or energy to doubt myself, I’ve learned that my abandonment to my own, unfiltered voice produces writing that I can really be proud of. 

I can’t write about adoption. I’m so glad that there are so many of you who do. I can only write about isolation and loneliness and how I’ve tried to maintain a tight grasp on hope despite these feelings. I won’t tell you it’s not hard. It’s hard. Some days it’s really hard. 

From what I’ve learned, my mom is prone to these feelings, too, because of what her adoption and the subsequent feeling of abandonment have done to her brain and her body. I know that she’s had to spend a lifetime working to understand the why and the what. As someone who has been plunged into this kind of thinking for, in the grand scope of things, a fleeting moment, I have tried to use this time to understand what it is that she is prone to feeling, and to think about the tools that I have that make me feel even just a little bit better. 

I feel lucky to be able to approach these feelings as an outsider who has been jolted to a brief stop in their midst. As such, I’ve tried to study my brain’s isolation, aided by the knowledge that this is not me, this is just a state that I have entered into via intense physical trauma. Writing and love, from others and myself, remind me of the impermanence of this moment. They tell me that I will get better. 

If you are hurting, I’m here as a person extending love, unconditionally, to tell you that you can feel better, too.

photo by Susan Stojanovich