Mental Toughness and Adoption

I have been thinking about mental toughness lately.

I think when you lose your mother, particularly when you are too young to talk about it, you are asked to take on the mantel of mother and yourself. In other words, I think we never can fully walk away or survive without the mother. We carry her in us in so many physical and mental and energetic ways. I don’t feel like listing them for some reason. I guess it’s because if you don’t know what they are already, you’re not my audience and I don’t want to work hard to try to explain myself to someone who is already one hundred steps behind me. This is said with love, not dismissal. I am saving us both time and energy. 

When I was a senior in high school, my best friend was accepted to Harvard. My mother, more than once, said something along the lines of “I don’t know why you aren’t going to Harvard, too. You’re just as smart as she is.” 

Number one, I didn’t apply. Number two, I didn’t have the grades or the athletic prowess my friend had. Number three, I didn’t dream of going to Harvard. I just wanted to feel it was okay to be myself, but because people didn’t talk about things like this when it was time to apply to colleges, I applied to schools that would take people like me: Kenyon, for example. 

It took so much energy for me to do things: get out of bed and go to school, finish my homework, cope with friends not calling when they said they would, dealing with brothers and a father who made a mess of our house despite our mother’s tears, living with the dread of seeing my mother’s tears, and of my own. 

What if adopted people came with some sort of gauge taped to our forehead so people could see (and we could see if we looked in a mirror) how much energy a thing was costing us? Wouldn’t it be interested for sixth grade teachers to see how much energy it took for their students to sit and do a page of math problems? Or to eat lunch in the cafeteria? Or to be at recess? Or to head home? Wouldn’t it be interesting for parents be able to see how much energy it took their (adopted) child to eat dinner compared to their other (biological) child who was eight months younger than the first? What if we could look in the rear view mirror of our car and see how much energy we were spending just existing?

I feel like so much guilt and shame adopted people carry has to do with the fact that they just didn’t have the same kind of energy those around them had and so it looked like they did less, accomplished less, and had less success in their life, when the truth is comparing an adopted person’s energy tank with another (kept) person’s is like putting the same amount of gas in the same cars, but having one drive two hundred miles and the other drive one hundred and expect the tanks to contain the same amount of gas at the finish line. 

I think a problem adopted people often have is energetic confusion. I think it’s why so many of us—me—struggle with money issues. Our energy is a resource, just like money is, and if we spend a lot of our energy trying to find safety in a world that does not understand we have alarms going off in our head all the time telling us we are in danger and are about to die or be hated or have the ground beneath us disappear, we don’t have any left to put in our savings account. Or in our checking account. We live hand to mouth, energetically, financially. Or perhaps we hourd our energy, our money, and we live like a tight fist, closed and unavailable and still not safe despite our resources because they have no flow, no life force. 

How can we have money in the bank when we don’t have any energy to spare? It makes no sense to have money when you can barely get through the day.  

We are fighting the natural stream of life because we don’t feel it, because for us, for the relinquished, the natural stream of life, in our systems, are taking us down the drain to annihilation because we can’t understand a mother giving up our body, we, our systems, see this as rejection, as a death sentence. 

And so we wither in so many ways. We don’t connect with others. We carry our shell. We survive each day, each meal, each breath, shallow and small.

I believe mental toughness is about using your energy to emerge from the chrysalis of suck. I believe that the terrible time teenagers go through when they need to individuate from their parents and seem like huge ungrateful assholes is the space adopted people need to occupy in order to keep their energy from going into other people’s bank accounts. As a teenager, I believed I had the power to kill my mother in various ways. One was in being myself. Another was to disentangle myself from her call that I be the one to whom she could tell her secrets, her unhappinesses. I see now, now that my mother is dead, that while cancer could kill her, my belief that establishing my own self would also kill her was my child’s brain driving the car of me. 

I am not that powerful. 

That’s the power of crazy thinking.

When I point my finger at my mother: it’s her fault I was not able to be myself. She kept me small by adopted me. She fucked up my life, I fire extinguisher myself and spray my energy will nilly, accomplishing nothing of merit, putting out no fires. 

As I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted, I named my cage—that I’d lost my sense of self and agency when I was relinquished and adopted—and then, by naming it and not stepping outside of the narrative cage I had constructed, I remained trapped. 

I had to do more than tell my story of my past in order to find myself as someone who’d been separated from her first life at birth. I had to point my finger at myself.

If I start my sentences with “I” instead of with “my mother” or “my father” or “society”, then I am pulling on the pants of agency.

I want…

I think…

 I will… 

For the first time in my life, I don’t worry about money. You know why? I save it when I get it now. 

I also say no to things that take energy I need to thrive, even if other people think what they are asking for is small, almost inconsequential: an email answered, a coffee date, an errand run.

No. No. No. No. I am so busy being myself. I just can’t drive you to the airport. I need to lie on the floor and catch my breath. 

And when I care for myself, energy bubbles, and I have more to give. I am more driven to connect to others, to contribute, to show up in all my gritty glory. 

I ask a lot of myself these days. I work really, really hard, and here’s the trick: I am doing these things in a way that feels like flow, like fun, like play. I am not kicking my legs like crazy trying to stay afloat.

I’m not exactly dancing, but it’s close. This morning I took my dog to the beach. It was early, and for long stretches it was just me and Bird running along the water’s edge. 

For a few minutes, I kept saying, I am so happy, I am so happy. I was trying to drive the moment into my brain so my brain could see my real life. I was reveling in the fact I had found this freedom, this wild life. I had always suspected it was there, but my misunderstood brain had, over and over, tripped me up and brought me back to square one: you are unwanted, worthless, in trouble. 

I am learning my brain, offering it forgiveness and tenderness, and it’s making all the difference.