Being an Adoptee and Feelings and Upset

Something occurred to me this morning as I was thinking about how fairly consistently I am in a state of upset. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m worried. I’m anxious. I’m afraid. I’m nervous. I’m furious. I’m super excited. I’m confused. I’m lost. I’m like a glass of water that’s on the verge of spilling pretty much all the time and this is so tiring, trying to avoid the spill.

Spills are messy and potentially dangerous. What if I wreck something? What if I upset someone else? What if the glass empties? I’m not supposed to be toppling over the edge. I’m supposed to be contained, nice, predictable. Right?

Or at least that’s what you tend to think when you grow up as a person knowing that you can, at any moment, be in big, big trouble. Or that you are big, big trouble.

It occurred to me today as I was in the shower crying about missing my mom (a feeling that comes out of nowhere, has seemingly nothing to do with the present moment, and, stranger still, if my mom magically appeared and it was life as normal with her, I’d be anxiously waiting for her to leave so I could get back to my thoughts of missing her), it occurred to me that the upset I feel isn’t so much this black seed of pain or loss I imagine is planted in my guts, it’s that I’m turned inside out.

I’m a feeling machine.

Because I understand longing and loss and the desire for love from the island of I am alone and I could die if I’m not rescued soon my body is finely tuned to pick up signals—when I lived in Palo Alto my favorite walk was called The Dish—named for what was, when built, the third largest steerable radio telescope in the world. I would look at the dish and think, Hello, hello, can you hear me? unsure of whom I was actually talking to. I would think about E.T. and the longing for home. I would feel.

To live in longing is to be a magnet feeling pulled towards an invisible other. It’s living in a state of heightened awareness that the connection is not happening in this moment, but maybe it will happen in the next.

It’s a perpetual no. No. Not this moment. Not. Not this life. No. Not you. No. Not me.

It’s not that great, always longing for what’s not there.

Unless. Unless I understand that I am inside out, that I am longing, that feeling of yearning for more. That I am the magnet and also the magnet’s pull.

The point is not the next moment. The point is not what will come to me. The point is what is. Living in the feeling, not in the belief that what matters is what comes next. That I am enough without her. I am complete.

And, also, I am not complete. I am a human and need relationships to thrive.

Living inside out makes you like a tuning fork. You are highly aware of vibration, of change, of movement because you are those things. This can be exhausting, most particularly the part where you have to keep explaining or having the need to apologize to others for your sensitivities.

Feeling for some people, for me, and, I would argue, for many fellow adoptees, is a full-time job. It’s not something to be overcome. It’s something to inhabit. This is our home, this longing, this pull. We’re not headed somewhere else. We live in the place of upset, when, not judged, becomes an art.

What do you do for a living?

I feel.

It’s an amazing job. I just had to know it wasn't a problem. I just had to realize it was a super power, something that could burn or kill me if I didn’t know what was going on. I just had to take a deep breath, find a friend, and say yes.