The Queen's Gambit, Pam Cordano's and My Plans for Flourish, and The Story Under the Story with Robyn Gobbel

If you haven’t watched the seven episodes of Netflix show The Queen’s Gambit, take a break from reading this and go watch them, or read on with the understanding that I’m going to talk about what happens in the final episode.

I also don’t feel like using time and energy giving you a synopsis of the show because it’s beautiful outside and I want to get on my bike. 

This is what I want to tell you: the show was an illustration to me of how adoptees can step into lives that feel like theirs, lives that feel familiar and thrilling, lives that feel like home, lives that are marked by fierce desires, faith and hope. 

In the final episode (this is the SPOILER), after Beth has won the chess world championship, we see her get out of the car that is driving her to the airport so she can walk. “But you’ll miss your flight,” her companion says as she asks the driver to pull over. This is the moment when Beth is being born into Beth, I believe—the moment she steps out of the river of energy others have created for her and into the river of herself. 

She ends up in an open area where men sit and play chess all day long, and as she walks by, we see the men know who she is. One says her name with deep respect, awe even, and she smiles. The men look up and greet her with reverence and joy--they see her, (she is home!) and one invites her to sit down and play.

For the first time in the show, Beth is wearing white head to toe, and she looks like an angel or a newborn swaddled in a blanket. She sits with the old man and as she settles into her seat, into the game, she rests her chin on her hands and looks into his face of the old Russian man who looks like the old janitor at the orphanage who had first introduced her to chess, had taught her, pushed her, endured her temper, had provided the ten dollars she’d needed to enter her first tournament. 

These strangers welcome her as a beloved. They see her as one of them, as family. 

Earlier in the show, a friend had put her own dreams of attending law school at risk in order to lend Beth the money she needed to travel to Russia for the tournament. Then, just as it looked as if Beth was going to lose the championship, she got a surprise phone call and discovered that a group of people she had not known cared about her had gathered to give her what she most needed: advice and support. 

When a person lives out dreams that come from their truest self, the universe tends to show up. Joseph Campbell talks about the helper who appears at a crucial moment when he discusses the hero’s journey. 

The thing with being adopted is that it can be very, very hard to identify your dreams when you don’t have a clear sense of who you are. When I was a freshman at Kenyon College, I fell in love with my year-long religion class, but because my mother and father had not travelled a similar path, I majored in English because English felt right, pre-destined. I grew up in a house full of books with a writer for a mother and a lawyer for a father. English was what people like me majored it: not religion. 

When I met my biological family, they took me to church. If I had grown up with that cluster of people, majoring in religion would have felt right, pre-destined. However, both my biological mother and father have written books, so it also would have made sense for me to walk the path I walked. 

Adoption is so complicated! So not black and white. 

Pam Cordano and I have been teaching our Flourish classes for a few months now, and what we had noticed during our adoptee retreats (back when groups of people could meet in person), we are seeing all over again: adoptees are different when they are gathered together: they are generally freer, truer, more themselves than when they are out in the world surrounded by people who were not relinquished when they were young. It helps to live in a liminal space, in the grey, when you are not alone.

Every Wednesday and Sunday as the Zoom screen starts to fill with faces, my belly settles and I can’t stop smiling. It’s like the scene where Beth walks into the park with all the men playing chess: I’m home. These people get me, and I get them. 

The men in the park aren’t adopted, but they love what Beth loves, and they claim her just as she claims them. This is another complicated part of being adopted: we have our biological family (whether we know them or not), or adopted family, and then, perhaps, we have the family we have chosen, the family of I mirror you accurately. You mirror me in the same way. 

I have come to see that the best thing I can do for myself as someone who has felt essentially wrong of most of her life, who has felt like outsider, is to talk freely. If people can’t handle what I have to say or want me to paint a bow on what hurts, I know now it’s not my job to try to jam myself into the shape better suited to their needs. 

I know there are plenty of people out there who are a lot less work, people around whom I don’t hold my breath and wonder when I can be alone again. People who don’t make me laugh a lot. 

 I have never been a group person. My favorite kind of party is one where I am alone, but I am working on this because the more I learn about the importance of relationship, the more I understand that the safety of alone is often, for me, fear-based and a little chicken shit. I’m not big on chicken shit. I like the word fearless better. I would prefer to have SHE WAS BRAVE on my tombstone instead of SHE WAS CHICKEN SHIT.

Know what I’m saying?

Pam and I have committed to a year of Flourish so that we can have two groups of adopted people who have time to really settle into community and see just how powerfully this helps to transform their lives into days and years that feel intentional, wonderous, and powerful. The groups will each have twenty people each, and if you miss a Wednesday from 4-6 PST, you can pop into the Sunday class that goes from 6:30-8:30 AM PST and vice versa. It costs $100 a month, and you can either pay upfront, or pay monthly. If you want to help support someone else’s membership, you can also do that.  

We have big goals for the year: transformation is the key word--mentally, physically, financially. Adoption touches just about every aspect of life, and so we are going to cover a lot of ground. We are going both wide and deep. 

We believe in freedom and joy. 

I am also going to do a 6-part webinar series that starts December 10th called The Story Under the Story with Robyn Gobbel that is for adopted people, first/birth parents, and adoptive parents. We are building the series around Write or Die, a class I developed after writing my book, a class that helps people better see who they are and what is getting in the way of a clear expression of their truest being. Robyn and I both think it is time for the triad to start working as a unit, for there is, as we know, strength in community. The webinar is on Zoom, and while you will only be able to see Robyn and me on the screen, you will be part of a group that has traditionally kept some distance from each other and, I believe, has suffered from lack of common understanding. 

I am so excited about Flourish and The Story Under the Story because I believe they are good. Pam and Robyn are both unconventionally brilliant and creative, and you and I get to work with them in an extended and surprisingly delightful ways. 

Both are about community and love. 

And you. 

(To sign up for Flourish, email me at anneheffron@gmail.com, and to learn more about The Story Under the Story, visit https://robyngobbel.com/event/storyunderthestory.)