Does Adoption Affect a Person's Internal Compass?

Part of being adopted, for me, has been a gradual unwinding of…myself. This unwinding at first, for about five years, felt like a falling apart, like dying.

But now, thank the sweet wind, it feels like coming home. Like a softening.

I was talking with a man who used to be a triathlete. “Now I’m 58 and I walk,” he said. I told him that when I was younger and ran I looked forward to the day when I wouldn’t be able to run anymore and would have to walk instead. “Why didn’t you just walk then?” the man asked. I told him the running hadn’t felt like at option. I told him I ran so I wouldn’t kill anyone. (Myself, really, I guess since I didn’t walk around with murder fantasies but I did think about the relief of dying.)

“I didn’t feel like that,” the man said. “I just liked to run.”

(I’ll bet you weren’t adopted, I thought but didn’t say.)

(I’m not saying that all adopted people run at some point in their lives so they won’t kill themselves, but I’m not not saying it, either.)

(Parentheses are the best!! You can both say and not say things with them!!!)

The great think about running is that you can feel like an arrow shot at a target—you start running and you go until you’ve completed some sort of line to the finish. You burn up spinning energy that is in your brain and heart and guts and skin and you get to take deep breaths and find yourself in the movement of forward. I think running, for me, was a way to get some relief from the deep internal spin I was living as a person with a busted or absent internal compass.

If human beings were born ready to face the world in the way horses or elephants are—able to ambulate and leave and return to the mother within hours after birth—the mother would have to carry the fetus for about two years, and this load would be too taxing for the woman’s body. The universe made a compromise: we’d be creatures with big prefrontal cortexes and we’d spend our lives walking upright, but we’d live in deep care with the mother for…how long exactly? Until we could walk and feed ourselves? Until we could call the neighbor or 911?

Really the mother and newborn, then, are one creature for months and months and months as the smaller one finishes developing.

(You can take the infant from its skin mother and give it to another, right?)

(You can change materials willynilly while building a skyscraper, right?)

When I was a teenager and went to the mall with friends, they would laugh at how almost every time, when exiting a store, I would go the wrong direction. I’ve learned that, in general, when I’m picking between going left or right, I should pick the direction that feels wrong.

I used to think I had a broken internal compass. I made up a story that my mother had dropped me on my head when I was young when people teased me for going the wrong way. It’s a strange feeling to have your body tell you to go one way when you know your body is probably wrong. It’s like being a wave that breaks the wrong way. Why is this happening? How could this be happening? What is wrong with me?

The other day I was meditating, and it occurred to me that the balloon feeling I have—unmoored, floaty—isn’t because of anything I’m doing wrong—my eating habits, my lack of list-making skills—but rather it is a result of being a ship without a compass, a balloon without a ballast. It occurred to me that the compass is something that might develop in the newborn as it crawls up the mother’s body to the breast, as it locates itself in space in relation to the mother’s eyes, to the mother’s heartbeat, to the mother’s skin.

It occurred to me that perhaps the internal compass is more of a skin thing, an eye thing, an ear thing, a body thing, and that part of the price of relinquishment trauma is a baby without a knowing of true north. A baby who grows up into a floaty adult.

I can live without a true north, just as an explorer can exist without a map. It just means I’m probably going to cover a lot of territory in a way that looks and feels out of control, unplanned, pointless even.

When you don’t know your true north it can be harder to dream because you’re so focused on surviving, not crashing into unseen mountains or falling into unmapped chasms. When you are trying to stay alive, you don’t float in wonderful possibilities. You stay alert, aware that every tree could hide a wild animal.

The game changer, for me, was in acknowledging what tools I actually have and letting go of the life where I pretended to have skills and tools I didn’t have—an internal compass, for example. I think I have something else: I have gut feelings. My gut tells me which way to go, who is safe, what is good for me.

The difference between an internal compass and gut feelings is that the compass is one attuned to society and to the laws of left and right, while gut feelings are personal, body-true.

The tricky part is that my gut used to tell me that everything was wrong, and so I couldn’t trust it to get me anywhere good. It just told me I was in trouble. Finding my voice, telling my story, finding a community of other adopted people and seeing how not alone I am in the way I feel and live has helped my fetal internal compass to begin to have a pulse of its own.

I’m 56 and an infant.

I’m a baby who is starting to dream.

To dream, I have to live, and to live I have to be in a body, this body, this body that believed it was left behind.

This body is here. It has always been here.

I was confused, but I am getting clearer on how my life works.

My life. It has always been my life.

Mine.

I might have been purchased at one point, but I was still in my body. I just got lost for a while.

But I am here.

Right here.