I’m going to keep this short because I have so many feelings, and I want to use this energy to get things done that I have been putting off such as folding laundry and resurfacing the driveway.

I’m pretty sure I could fly to the moon right now on my own fury.

I’m kidding about the driveway. I just need something more physically aggressive to do than folding laundry and paying bills.

Someone on my Facebook feed recommended the book Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté, and even though ADD wasn’t something I thought much about, I ordered the book because I like to keep up a bit with what my friends are learning. 

One page in, I went to get a pen. “Never at rest, the mind of the ADD adult flits about like some deranged bird that can light here or there for a while but is perched nowhere long enough to make a home.” 

 Last night I had a dream that I found myself on the side of the stage (off-stage) while the Beatles were playing. I was sitting at a set of cymbals, and I knew it was my job to hit those shiny golden discs with my sticks. I just didn’t know when. The song was one I had never heard before, so I just hit them sporadically. The group would turn to me like HELLO?! and that was also a clue for me to take a whack.

I felt panicked. It was like I was in a dance contest and everyone else knew the steps and I’d missed all the classes. It was like I was a bird surrounded by other birds and had no idea how to open my wings. It was like I was a cricket dropped into a Vegas casino. It was like being in school and having no idea what the teacher was saying. It was like listening to someone tell me their phone number and hearing the words but not understanding them enough to write them down, nodding and scribbling as if I had got it but knowing I was in trouble because I wouldn’t have this person’s number when I needed it. 

I have been running after the ability to focus for as long as I can remember. When I was in high school, the formula for me to be able to my homework was to go for a run, go home and eat a bunch of sugar, get high from peanut M&M’s, cookie or brownie batter and then crash. It was then I could focus, slumped and exhausted. The price was depression. 

In college I discovered Diet Coke. 

In graduate school I discovered coffee.

Both of these things gave me a high that helped me focus, but because I have a sensitive system, they also gave me stomach upset, headaches, and moodiness.

I spend my days like a fish under ice, hoping to find openings where I can come up and catch a breath of air, find enough focus so I can think clearly and get things done. Most of the time I feel like someone running to try to keep a pile of tipping plates from toppling over. The miracle is when suddenly the plates are still and I can stand and have coherent thoughts.  

I always blame myself. I didn’t sleep enough. I ate the wrong thing. I drank the wrong thing. I am doing too much. I am too distractable. I need to just buckle down and focus. I’m like a little kid. I’m not disciplined. 

What reading Scattered Minds is showing me is that these thoughts are like yelling at a squirrel for hoarding nuts. 

I do these things because I am wired to do them.

The fact that it is often nearly impossible for me to focus is not my fault. This is the most shocking revelation I’ve had as an adopted person: the way my head works is not my fault.

Just writing that makes me cry. 

I have been coming close to this realization—realizing that my brain was like a mirror that had been dropped had allowed me to finally write a book because I let myself write in a style—shattered—that mirrored my thinking, but it hadn’t really hit me that this spinning I carry in my head is not my fault. 

When I was adopted, I needed to come with an owner’s manual that explained what trauma does to a brain and what can be done to help. 

I am so furious that I did not.

Adoptees kill themselves because they do not feel understood or seen. They kill themselves because they do not feel safe or loved. They kill themselves for any number of reasons. I will tell you that the pain of a brain that refuses to be still is agonizing, especially when you don’t know it is not your fault. 

The Primal Wound and Scattered Minds and You Don’t Look Adopted (my book—I need to sell copies so I can get the kind of support I need—and this includes therapy, massage, chiropractic, and time in float tanks) need to be required reading for every adoptive parent and adoptee. 

The end.

I’m going to go walk around and be pissed for a bit. Fuckhead just walked by and he is looking really fat. I want to go find out what he has been doing. This will make me feel better. (If you don’t know about Fuckhead, he’s a turkey who came banging on my door one day and with whom I subsequently fell in love with