Inflammatory Advice to Adoptive Parents--or Thank God No One Told My Parents This Because Part of Me is Still Chicken

I know a young adoptee whose father signed up him for basketball camp. I talked to the young man the night before he was supposed to start camp, and he was panicked. “I can’t do it,” he said. “My father signed me up without asking. I don’t want to do it.”

He took a deep breath. “I won’t do it.”

I know why the boy’s father signed the boy up for camp: the boy was miserable, isolated, and bored. The boy needed community and movement. The boy needed to change his life because life as it was shriveled the boy, glued him to his computer day after day, night after night. The father was saving the boy’s life.

“I just remembered I can make my eyes really bloodshot by holding my breath and bearing down hard,” the boy said. “I can’t go to camp if I look sick.”

I had a trick for when I felt overwhelmed as a kid and couldn’t do my homework for all the upset that was spinning in my head. I’d smash my right hand against the edge of the piano, spinning like a dervish so my hand was going fast enough to do damage to the muscle, and, if I was really lucky, the bone. “I fell again,” I’d say. “My hand hurts so much. I can’t write.”

When my parents sent me to summer camp, I got “sick” and was sent home. When I went to college, I developed an eating disorder. Another time at another college I got on my bike and ran away from the place.

I drove across the country nine times because it was a way to keep anyone, including myself, from trying to pin me down, from trying to make me “real” and live a life that felt so wrong.

Yesterday I had a personal training session at a gym, and my trainer asked me to step up and down repeatedly on a wobbly surface. I got the job done quickly: up down, up down, up down.

“Okay” she said when I’d done the three sets. “Now be in your body and do it.”

I started laughing. Hahahahaha. In my body? I was so far from that thing.

But really I wasn’t far at all. I was just confused. I climbed into my body, stretched into the edges and owned the experience. By owned I mean felt. Now I am stepping onto the wobble, now I feel the wobble, now I am deciding to step down, now I feel the ground. I laughed. It was such a simple process, step up, step down. What really was the difference if I was in my body or not?

The difference was that I was present. I looked into my trainer’s eyes and I laughed. It was no big deal. So what? I was in my body. So what? She was in her body. We were two people in a gym spending time together. It’s different when the person you are with is there. It just is. Your body knows presence, and it thrives when it feels seen and experienced by another, another who is present.

One time when was deeply depressed in college, I had a moment of thinking the only way out was to go crazy. I was in the school counselor’s office, and I was crying about my eating disorder and about gaining weight and about thinking I had to leave school. In my mind, I saw myself standing on a cliff, and I thought about jumping off. I was sweating because the choice felt real and very, very dangerous. I would rather die than stay where I was in my body, dealing with feeling fat in a world that wanted thin, dealing with the fact that once again changing colleges had not solved my problems and I was still stuck with myself and this life that felt so off track.

The therapist said, “Put your body in your body,” and I did it, and it was so strange—I actually had control of putting myself into myself! It was like I was putting a sandwich into a baggie or a hand into a glove or a baby inside a mother. It was so physical.

And I could do it.

Later, I would still drop out of college again even though my parents were wildly unhappy about my choice because staying in my body, in my life, in school, no longer felt like putting a hand in a glove. It felt like crawling into a suit made of barbed wire. I absolutely could not do it.

I had the sense my young adoptee friend felt that going to basketball camp was like crawling into a suit of barbed wire, and I couldn’t think of anything I could say that would make sense to him at that point. I think his father was going to have to force him to go, and this is very hard for me to write, because if my parents had tried to force me to stay in college I might have tried to hurt myself to escape. I might have told them from the depths of my guts that I hated them and that they weren’t my real parents. I might have acted like an animal in a trap and bit anything that came close to me.

But if I’d stayed in college, I would have eventually made a friend. I would have eventually fallen in love with a class. I would have eventually learned to deal with the skin I was in. I would have done what my brain said was impossible: be accepted as I was.

This process may have taken decades, depending on how stubbornly my brain declared I was unlovable, unacceptable, wrong, but if I hadn’t walked through the flaming doorways of I Truly Don’t Think I Can Do This I never would see my confusion for what it was: wrong.