I talk to so many adopted people that half the time I don’t know whether the thoughts and feelings I have are mine or someone else’s. In an adoptee group I do Sunday mornings, today someone talked about carrying undeveloped seeds of self in their body, and I had a picture of a rocket getting ready to blast off, the steam and fire, the countdown, the contained energy almost painful to witness because, you know as the observer, when the rocket needs to do its thing and go. The rocket wasn’t meant just to blow steam for days and weeks and years as it waited for lift off. It was created to fly.

I test drove a BMW once and knew right away it would be a terrible car for me to own. My feeling was that car was not happy going 30 or 40 or even 60 miles an hour. I guessed I would feel most in alignment with the potential energy of that car when it was going about 85. Anything less than that made me feel like I was walking a tiger on a tight leash.

When you are raised by people who are not genetic mirrors to your body and mind, or when you are raised by an alcoholic parent who sees the bottle with more interest than they see you, or if a parent dies when you are young, or when you are sexually abused before you know how to talk about what happened, or when you have a narcissistic parent, or when you were in NICU as a baby, or on and on and on, important seeds of potential in your being that needed recognition, mirroring, tending to, observation, and encouragement, can have a failure to thrive crisis where, like a person who refuses to unfist their hands, it’s a challenge to reach for what you really want.

You know that feeling when you have to take a shit? (Sorry.) Imagine living like that all the time but never getting the satisfaction of relief. You know that feeling when you pop open a can of Coke? Imagine if the action was silent. Imagine being in class and having the teacher ask you 100 questions and not getting one answer right. Imagine looking in the mirror and only seeing the wall behind you.

A person could go nuts living like that. It’s like a lifetime of flicking on a light switch only to never have lights go on. This kind of unfulfilled action can become unbearable, so, to survive, a person might stop expecting anything, stop caring. A person might get eczema or start to take drugs or drink a lot of beer so that reality would fuzz over and be easier to tolerate. A person might get a gun and blow out their screaming brains.

What I’m saying is, if you have seeds of potential in you that have not been encouraged or allowed to fully germinate, the seeds don’t disappear just as a car doesn’t disappear if you don’t drive it. The car sits there and quietly falls apart. I don’t think seeds of potential sit there in you like a doily on a table. I think they squirm, rot, have tantrums, emit poison, become cancer, or fury, or make you collapse because they are sucking up all your energy. 

I have a friend whose parents forced her major in business instead of liberal arts when she was young. They wanted her to be able to own the two houses she owns now, have the three kids in good schools, drive the nice car, wear the big diamond earrings. She made her parents happy, and she gets to think about this as she drinks in secret on her way home from work, as she chugs at the hidden bottle of wine in the bathroom while her family sits at dinner. Unrealized potential is so thirsty, so hungry, so mean, so heartbroken.

What do you do when, at thirty, at forty, at sixty, you discover these seeds in yourself? What happens when you realize the source of your eczema is your desire to play the piano, a thing deemed too loud by your noise-sensitive mother all those years ago? What happens when you realize your urge to learn how to cage fight was a real thing and your soccer-playing family and friends’ bewilderment kept you on the pitch instead of doing what your body and mind both needed and craved? What happens when you find yourself married and in a career and in a house that all turn out to not be in alignment with base seeds that have been suffocating inside of you for decades?

Chaos.

To go from a seed to a carrot, to a sunflower, to a birch tree is its own kind of chaos. To go from coping you to thriving you is chaotic—you are bringing the chaos that has existed deep in your body, finally, out to meet the light. In order to have order, generally, you need to have disorder first. I am fascinated by our culture’s aversion to chaos, especially in schools where things are supposed to be orderly so they can be on some sort of gradable scale and especially in the people I know who feel they should be living a life not like the one they are currently investing their energy in. Feeling chaos inside of yourself because, at fifty, suddenly you are doing things you’ve never allowed yourself to do before can be so destabilizing.

Hallelujah.

Here’s to destabilizing the foundations we’ve built out of fear and habit. Here’s to letting the things we didn’t even know we wanted take over our lives.

I turned 58 yesterday, and so I am thinking about seeds. I’m wondering what I’ve got in me. I’m wondering what’s going to happen next. I’m curious about what I’m going to do, what I’ll find, what I’ll let see the light of day.