A guy was here today to fix the septic system. He was showing me the alarm box, and he was telling me what he was going to do and what I should do the next time this happens.

Dear Reader, I tried to focus. I hung on the the forsythia bush as if grabbing onto its branches would make the words the man was saying connect with my brain in a way that made sense and was repeatable—so if, for example, someone asked me what I learned I’d be able to list the facts instead of getting light-headed and admitting that I had learned nothing except that the forsythia was under-watered because one branch had dryly snapped off in my hand.

I work with so many adoptees. I listen to them, talk to them, read their work, laugh with them. I am an adoptee! I mean, if there is one group of people I get, it’s them. This was not always the case.

If I get adoptees as a group that means I also get myself. I used to have no idea why I did the things I did. Now I’m so transparent. I’m one big DUH to myself these days. It’s wonderful.

I used to have no idea why I could not focus consistently in school. Sometimes—and it was enough to wreck everything because it was obvious I COULD focus—I’d be completely dialed into my classes and my homework, but then out of the blue the thing would happen where I’d be so far above the earth that all I could do was try to recite words: “tree”, “staple”, “crosswalk” in what seemed like the appropriate times so that people would not know my brain was offline.

It’s weird to be smart and dumb at the same time. My mom was frustrated when my best friend went to Harvard and I didn’t even apply. “I don’t understand why she goes there and you don’t,” my mother once said. “You are just as smart as she is.”

Somehow my mother forgot to note that my friend was an athletic superstar, but my mother also didn’t give a flying fuck about athletics. She cared about brains. Hers. Mine. And why mine wasn’t performing as it could. My mother was one of those people to mostly keep negative thoughts about her children to herself, and so it wasn’t as if she was walking around asking why I was such an idiot, but to her the fact that I tested well and was a voracious reader of books she loved made my subpar grades something that just didn’t make sense, and so somehow all of her confusion and frustration translated into my knowing there was something wrong with me. If only I could get my act together everything would be okay.

But the plane of my mind was often far above the earth. I was using a great deal of energy just pretending to be present. How could I also memorize math equations? My mind was spinning so fast it looked still, but there was too much movement for presence. Running was one thing that made sense to my mind. This way I could try to get my body to keep up with my brain. Running felt like home.

But I also had a dysregulated nervous system, so I wasn’t able to push myself the same way my superstar friend could, because if I got too stressed, too out of breath, my mind went into panic and then collapse. I’m not safe. I’m going to die. I have to stop moving now so I can stay alive.

So I ran, but I didn’t win all that many races. I wasn’t running to win, after all. I was running to find a groove where I felt okay. Safe. Real. Home.

Now I imagine a huge hand holding me around my body as a fisherman holds a fish when he takes if off the hook as I try to focus. Maybe I could have gotten not an F in Molecular Biology if I’d been held so that my mind didn’t race off and leave me with no space to make sense of what the fast-talking teacher was saying.

What if every adoptee came with a huge hand that could hold them when they took off in the plane of Not Here? What if parents and teachers and friends and neighbors understood there’s a good chance if you lost your mother at an early age that you aren’t walking with both feet firmly on the planet? That you are a floater, someone just trying to hold on the the umbilical cord of hope that keeps one from disappearing from the world altogether?

Oh, to feel held. To feel both feet on the ground, planted.

Rooted.

Safe.