I used to think one thing that made me valuable was my willingness to throw myself over cliffs. The world needs people to be the first one to jump in a pool; the world needs someone to have sex with people in a way that looks like a prostitute who doesn’t get paid; the world needs people who touch a hot stove to let us know we’ll get burned if we do the same thing.

Imagine being an arrow that is fitted into the string on a bow. Imagine feeling the string’s tension increasing as you are pulled back and back and back, the purpose in your arrow soul thrumming with the excitement of feeling you are about to fly straight into the heart of the target. This is what you were created for. You feel the fingers release the string, and everything in you screams with joy….

For a second. Out of nowhere, another hand comes and the unthinkable happens: you are snatched out of your wild and true arc of flight and you are carried into a different world. You go from flight to some new movement and you close your eyes and wait to die.

Only you are carried off onto another field, and you are shot at another target, but the joy is not the same because it is not a target that looks like home. It is someone else’s target. you play the game because someone pulls the string, but everything has changed and you don’t know what to say or feel about it.

When you are an arrow that is shot at a target that does not feel like home, it’s easier to say, I’ll drive us to the next bar, even though you are the drunkest one of the bunch. It’s easier to be reckless with your own life and the lives of others because life doesn’t feel real.

It’s easier to get jumped into a gang because you are fearless; you are reckless. It’s easier to start a fire in the gym at your high school because you are fearless. You are reckless. It’s easier to steal a car. It’s easier to tell your parents to fuck off, to try to push away every person who claims to love yo—you can do this because you are fearless. You are reckless. You are an arrow with no clear target or reason for living. It is your job, perhaps, to be lost, to be unsteady, to be without a purpose, and the best way to fill that contract is to be fearless, to be reckless, and to throw everything you are ever given that has worth away.

I have been studying courage for a long time because it is something I want to have. In my mind, courage means my heart and my actions are in alignment. It’s easy to confuse courage with fearlessness and recklessness because all of those things involve a boldness of action, but courage, for me, involves the heart where fearlessness can actually bypass the heart’s truth to morph into a form of insanity—put a fearless person in a cage full of lions and see what happens next. Give a fearless person a bottle of pills and prepare for a funeral.

Recklessness is frightening, and I can see how many of my behaviors in the past frightened my parents, my husbands, my child. Recklessness means I don’t care enough to try my very best. Recklessness is a nasty bedfellow. Recklessness will spend your money and then ask for more.

When you believe you were torn from your purpose it is easy to become reckless. Recklessness can feel like home: familiar —and therefor safe in that familiarity. Recklessness can feel like your birthright.

To have courage means you are rooted in your own heart. It means you believe in your own value and are willing to fight for it. As a writing coach, I tap into people’s courage—there lies their voice, their story.

When you speak from your courageous center, you exist. It means you have to feel. It means you seek out the center of a target you claim for your own and, in doing so, you find a home that fits your heart.

We didn’t ask to be born. We didn’t ask our mother’s to give us up. (Or, who knows, maybe we did.) But we’re here.

So now what?

I don’t agree with living with adoptee trauma. I don’t want it. It’s not mine.

That’s not true: it is mine, and I’m really furious about this.

Fury can be great fuel for an arrow. I just have to have the courage to feel it and use it and be it and to let myself relax so I can fly.