The Start of the Sequel to You Don't Look Adopted I Decided Not to Finish Because I'm Going in a New Direction

I was going to put this in the trash, and then I thought—but I put so much work into it. I have changed since writing this, and so it’s not a story I want to focus on in the same way anymore, but I also want to honor what I had to say a couple of months ago after facing life weeks after a major psilocybin therapy treatment.

My Heart

My heart feels wrong. I can’t get myself to do a long inhale, a slightly longer exhale. Instead, I breathe like air costs money, and I am trying to spend as little as possible every minute of every day. My heart is the key to what I desire most of all: love, and yet somehow I can’t manage to get myself to give my heart the thing it most needs: oxygen.

What’s so hard about inhaling for the slow count of 6 and exhaling for the slow count of 8? I’ll tell you what’s so hard. That kind of breathing tells my brain everything is okay.

I breathe like I’m tiptoeing across a room, determined no one will hear me or know I’m there. a great way to avoid growing roots because the body’s too busy trying to survive.

I feel like a baby chick still inside the egg, terrified of getting any bigger, terrified of busting out into the world, determinedly freezing into stillness, hoping to fake its way into perpetual embryo-ism.  

Here’s the thing: if I breathe deeply, if I exist, I have to really feel what it’s like to be not enough, to have no hope of ever being enough, and this is more than heartbreaking, it’s an impossibility. I refuse to be that person, and yet I am her. It’s like being a flower and your one job is to fully bloom, and even when you’re all-out bloomed, your system tells you that you’re not there yet, and you don’t know what to do. Oh! The panic and disappointment and shame. You used up all your bloom juice and for some reason you can’t figure out, it’s not enough. The defect has to be you. There is something fundamentally wrong with you. You’re alive, but somehow you don’t measure up. You couldn’t even do the simplest thing: say yes to life.

HACK THE FROZEN SEA INSIDE WITH AN AXE

Kafka said, I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

AFTER THE TRIP 

It has been seven weeks since I took MDMA and psylocibin. I have the sensation of having a black suitcase in my lower belly, packed and ready to go. I want to know what’s in it. I want to know what my body feels like when it doesn’t have to carry something like this in it.

Now that I have experienced meeting the trauma I have carried in my body all my life, feeling it, and letting it go, I have the sense I can do anything. I faced what I have been running from—the death-vice grief and shock of being separated from what felt like my life force at birth.

It’s not that easy getting appointments to take illegal drugs with a therapist. I want to do it NOW. I want whatever is sitting in my body to get out.

I have to wait.

I decided to write a book about what it was like to write my story, make it public, spend lots of time with lots of adopted people, and take a therapeutic dose of psychedelics. I thought that would be a constructive way to pass the time until I can lie down, tuck in under a blanket, take the medicine, put on an eye pillow, rest for a half an hour or so until, once again, I get to see and feel what I’ve been carrying so I can let it go.

I want to do a good job of getting down what it’s like for me now so that after I take the medicine again I’ll have a clearer sense of where I was and where the medicine took me. Last time, I was in the chair for eight hours, but what I remember boils down to a much shorter time span. I don’t know where I was all that time—I mean, obviously my body was in the chair—but I have no idea where my mind was, and even though my therapist took great notes, a lot went undocumented, and I am curious: what happened? What did I know when I was on the medicine that I don’t know now?

I want to tell you what I remember so that you, too, can have a trip.

I think when you lose your mother at birth, you learn to distrust your eyes. A newborn sees a blurry world in black and white and shades of grey. During the first two weeks, the baby can only see things that are 8-12 inches from their face. This is about the distance from their face to the face of the mother when the baby is breast feeding. Mothers are encouraged to alternate breasts while feeding to help the visual development.

After two weeks, the baby probably will start to recognize their mother’s face, but they will only focus on it for a few seconds. At three weeks, the field of vision remains the same, but the baby can now hold their gaze for up to 10 seconds.

After a month the baby will start to move their head to look from side to side. The action of moving the eyes side to side won’t kick in until sometime between two and four months. Writing this sentence down makes me feel sick. I imagine me as an infant, my head going from side to side, looking, looking, like a flashlight in the dark. Why have eyes if they don’t let you know you are safe? Why have eyes if you can’t see what you think of as yourself: her? 

A 2-3 month milestone is the baby’s ability to recognize faces. If I went to my new parents and stopped seeing whoever had been taking care of me when I was 2 ½ months old, what did my eyes see? What did my brain and body make of this change?

I feel like this is when I started eating mud.

THE BIG SUCK

My mother liked to imitate how vigorously I sucked down my bottles. I think she interpreted this as a hearty appetite, a wild hunger, something she tamped down in herself with cigarettes, coffee, diets taped to the refrigerator. I think she also saw me as a pig. I was the thing she was not allowed to be. She loved to say how people on the streets of New York City would tell her I should be in baby food commercials. This was proof of how obvious my hunger was. Proof also, perhaps, of how well she fed me, how much I was thriving.

I used to think these stories were funny and cute, and I repeated them to friends. Now I want to turn my face away from the telling or the hearing. The stories are no longer funny or cute to me. I was probably desperate, beyond hungry. My mother’s belief that my thick legs and puffy cheeks were a marker of my wellness breaks my heart. I imagine I was trying to drink my way to comfort, maybe to a life that would feed me in a way that felt right, safe, like home so I could stop sucking and rest.

My body goes limp when I write that, defeated, like a dog collapsing right before its kicked. It makes me feel sad that my body does that, gives up. I am tired of collapsing. Literally exhausted. I feel like I could swaddle each cell of my body in a tiny blanket, tuck it into some tiny bed, and it could sleep for a year straight, and then maybe then I would feel…ready.

For me, life has felt on the other side of some sort of wall—made of bricks, glass, solar systems, Saran Wrap. I am here, yes. I am alive, yes. But is this my life? Not exactly.

Do you see what I did? I tried to soften the blow by saying not exactly when the real thing is no. This is what adoptees do time and time again when they talk about their lives and themselves. They use words that are not the accurate ones. There is a difference between like and love, between don’t like and hate, between hungry and famished, between sad and miserable, between confused and lost. 

This is what it’s like existing as an adopted person. I say one thing, and then I have to say another thing to explain why I said the first thing. Like, if you ask me what my name is, I’ll tell you Anne Heffron, but this thing will poke at my brain saying Are you going to leave out the other part? And I will say back to the poke, They asked for my name, not my life story. The poke will poke back and say, They asked for your name, and you didn’t tell them the full truth. This kind of back and forth is fatiguing to my entire system. It’s like everyone else plays tennis by hitting the ball once to their opponent, but as an adopted person, tennis means I have to hit the ball two or three times just to get it over the net.

Meanwhile, people around me are like, Why are you hitting the ball so many times? Don’t you see you just have to hit it once? But if I ask them where they got their muscular legs from, they don’t even have to think. My mom, they’ll say. My grandpa, they’ll say. If someone asked me, first I have to think: I hate questions like thisand I burn through all sorts of stress hormones feeling upset. Then I have to think about the fact I never saw either of my biological parents’ legs. As I’m thinking, the other person says, Your mom was an athlete in college, right? and I have to think about whether I want to say, Yes, but her DNA is not in my body, and then deal with the whole “real parents” conversation.

 THE TRIP

“I think it’s starting,” I said. “I’m beginning to float out of my chair.”

“That’s good,” my therapist said.

I felt energy move up through my feet, up through my body. I was becoming a river, only my arms were by my side and the river wanted me to raise my arms over my head so it could flow through me. I thought about my therapist watching me, seeing me raise my arms, and I felt self-conscious. I’d thought I could just lie there, eye pillow on, and experience the medicine without having to participate in such a silly way! I mean, I was just a woman who had taken a pill, and who was in charge, me or the medicine? Did I want to seem so easily influenced?

I raised my arms, and I became a river. If I was going to change, I was going to have to do things I wouldn’t normally do. This decision was a miracle, and it makes me cry to write about it, partly because how can I tell you how important this moment was for me, and partly because the memory feels outside of me and I’m afraid that maybe I didn’t change, after all. It also makes me cry because I could so easily have refused to raise my arms and maybe I’d have missed the amazing experience I had.

The thing about being a river is that it means life is moving so quickly and I have no control over it. It makes me think I will be dead soon, and so I want to put down my arms, stop the flow, get back to control. To stuck.

I’m sitting here writing about a what is now a memory. What happened to the river? My body is full of anger now. At least once a day I lay on my yoga mat and imagine a sledgehammer whacking at my whole self, breaking up the packed, old ice that fills my body.

I wish I were back in that chair. I wish I had just swallowed the medicine. I wish I could do the whole thing over and over and over again until this body of mine felt clean and whole. I want to have my therapist at my side, writing down what I say, encouraging me, asking me questions that open doors and doors and doors. For a space of time, I got to go home. Inside me. And now here I am, going back to the soldier life of one foot in front of the other, just keep going and do what you are supposed to do.

How do I get myself back?

I want to become a weasel, an animal that burrows under a tree’s roots. I want a few days, three?, to catch my breath so I can get my feet under me and go out into the world and be me.

I want to tell you about my heart, about what happened the day after I took the medicine. I was lying on the couch, still deep in the float of the medicine. When I’d woken up at 6:30, I thought I was fine. I was getting ready to drive to Starbucks to get some espresso, and then the medicine let me know that what I really wanted to do was to lie down.

My body wanted to rest. This was wonderful.

I put my hand on my heart and I imagined there was a cylinder of space in my chest. I could see my heart like a reluctant swimmer sitting on the edge of a pool. My heart balanced on the edge of its home space, and I had the sense it had been balancing here my entire life.

It explained the feeling I carried in my chest like you have in your elbow or knee when it’s out of alignment and needs you to give it a quick move so it can do that exciting/gruesome click back into place. When I used to run in high school, that stuck cramp in my heart kept me from running faster. Still. It keeps me from taking a full breath. I have asked massage therapists and chiropractors to work on my diaphragm to see if they couldn’t loosen some attachments so I could fully open my ribs when I inhaled and feel as if I’d taken a complete breath.

Imagine! A life led, even with years of yoga, without having the sense of the lungs filled!

That pretty much sums up how my life feels: partially inflated.

No wonder I’m fully of fury! What balloon aspires to only be filled partway? I mean, what’s the point in all that rubber?

What a waste.

The thing is, I’m not sure what the point is of getting fully inflated. It’s like why get all dressed up if you have no plans to go any where? What if I’m too busy being mad, living in tantrum, to inflate myself? What if I’m holding myself back because I ask myself, Well, what’s even the point of fully showing up?

I think this is one of the curses of being born to a body that does not claim you. The let’s try with my whole being part of me seemed to have gotten will beat out of it.

The Verizon salesperson taught my dog how to high five. All I have to do now is say “high five” and my dog will raise his right paw. The reason he does this is because he gets a treat. High five = treat.

My birth mother and society taught me showing up = loss. They showed me that going through the insane squeeze of the birth canal and spending all that energy growing into a person with fingernails and hair and eyes and needs is a so what event.

What if adoptees have a flaming, poisonous splinter in the core of their being. A splinter that is optional?

I am left with things that feel heavy and wrong.

My name, for example.

My last name feels like it weights ten thousand pounds.

Heffron.

I feel like a cow that was branded by a farmer—the cow’s identity claimed by a man because the man had paid for the cow or had owned the cow’s mother and so the man had the right in the eyes of society to put his brand on this cow which said mine.

I do not have one drop of Heffron blood in me.

I’m writing to you from the mud.

This is not easy. But there are things I want you to know.

Maybe if I tell you what happened, it will help you get out of the mud, if that is where you are, too. Or maybe it’ll help you understand someone better, someone you love or want to love.

Two weeks ago I had one of the greatest experiences of my life. I was on a couch for eight hours, feeling and talking, feeling and talking. The therapist who was sitting on the other couch wrote down the things I said. They asked questions. They made observations. Someone sat with me for eight hours and listened to what I had to say and said nothing about their own lives! Such luxury!! They not only listened, they took notes!

I wish this experience for everyone. The experience of feeling important, heard, and loved.

I am not a drug person. I don’t take any prescription medications.  I rarely even drink alcohol, although I do have a bottle of Mezcal in the kitchen because I like to know I could drink if I wanted to. I pride myself on living a “clean life”, and so I was hesitant to take MDMA and psylocibin. Really what I am telling you is that I can be kind of an asshole about how in control I am. Look at me! No chocolate cake, thank you. I can’t eat that stuff. No, thank you. I can’t drink wine. It gives me a headache but I will have the chia pudding—it’s my birthday and I want to splurge. Oh! The whipped cream is made from the water in a can of garbanzo beans! Sure, put some of that yumminess on top of my pudding!

The thing is, I have friends who have done MDMA and psylocibin, and the changes in them are noticeable and…well…enviable. They were happier, calmer, more sure of themselves, more at peace.

I want to talk to you about money, about the cost of this kind of therapy. I could have gone to Italy and stayed for a week or even two, I think, or I could have done MDMA. I’ve gone to Italy, and it was amazing, but it did not change my brain or my sense of self nearly as much as the MDMA did, so, for as spectacular as the Vatican was, I’d still crawl onto a couch, accept the pill the therapist held out in a ceremonial little dish, swallow it with some water, put on an eye-pillow, and let the therapist tuck a blanket around me, wishing me well.

The thing about writing about your life is that it’s hard to know what’s true when you use words to create something that happened in the past. Sometimes the words can take over, and instead of accurately recounting what happened, the sentence becomes about something else: maybe how one word sounds when it comes after the other or maybe your brain thinks it’s telling the truth when what it’s doing is telling story-truth or paper truth but not this is really what happened truth.

Here's an example: in You Don’t Look Adopted I wrote about my daughter being born and my thought that she looked adopted because she was half Asian and I was not. I wrote that because I was writing a book about how being adopted made me feel different from others around me, and when I was writing that book, I entered the body that had just given birth to my daughter with this brain that was now seeing adoption everywhere, I brought my present-day awareness to a situation that had happened over twenty years earlier.

Here's what I think is the real story. I gave birth to a body that felt like a miracle to me. My body had made another body, and I was not thinking about how we were different at that time. I’m not sure I was thinking much at all so much as just looking at her.

I believe the adoptee narrative of separation and difficulty bonding can bleed over into genuine attachments and harm them. As much as it empowered me to write my story of how adoption had affected me, it also did a great deal of damage. I named my cage and, in the naming, more firmly put myself in it.

It’s so complicated when things are both true and not true.

This is not going to make sense. I’m going to say everything at once. I’m both alive and dead. Can you sit with this. Can you just listen and see how it makes you feel? Can I?

Storytelling is not the same as living. We live and then we create stories.

Stories create a lot of problems when you are adopted.

Let’s talk about “framing”. How do you frame a situation where a woman has a baby, doesn’t want it, can’t keep it, is tricked into giving it away, has the baby stolen from her, etc. etc. and then other people take the baby as their own and raise it?

Story: An account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. An account of past events in someone's life or in the evolution of something.

Well, let’s start with something easy: Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, a woman and a man…what? Had a one-night stand? Once upon a time a condom fell off? Once upon a time a man raped a woman? Once upon a time a woman and a man had too little money and too many children? Hmmm. This is getting complicated!

Okay. Let’s keep it simple. Once upon a time a man and a women made a baby.

That’s simple enough. Clean. To the point.

Then what happened?

Once upon a time, a man and a woman had a baby and…and what??

I was meditating, trying to get back to where the mushrooms had taken me, when I was overcome with sadness. It was like I was a bird spirit trying to land inside my turtle body. It didn’t matter how much a meditated, how much I got things right—my body was what it was, and it was not mine. I was going to have to live with this fact my entire life, and it was so sad. Imagine a bird taking flight and then realizing it can never land again. It always has to have its feet in the air. It can never fully catch its breath, rest.

What do you do with this kind of information?

I want more MDMA. I want more mushrooms, and yet all that’s available to me right now is a can of Diet Coke and a bunch of peanut butter filled pretzels. Once again I’m trying to fill a hole with caffeine or peanut butter.

I need something to change. It can’t be like this my whole life. Life can’t be me, in air, wanting to land.

What is true, true, body true, and what is mind true?

What would happen if I stayed?

Two weeks and two days after I’d done the MDMA, I went to see my father. On my way there, I called to give my ETA. My call went to voice mail, but his voice mail box was full. I had the thought that maybe he was dead in his apartment, and when I would get to the retirement facility, I’d have to ask to be let in, and then me and whoever let me in would see my father sprawled on his floor, dead.

I wondered how long it would take for the will to be processed and for whatever money I would get to go to my bank. I wondered how much money was left in his account. I wondered if I’d have enough to get a new car and a down payment on an apartment in Santa Cruz.

When my dad called me twenty minutes later, I thought, Remember his voice. This is your father’s voice and one day it won’t exist anymore. Loving and not caring about someone at the same time is awful. It’s like eating your own arm but not feeling it. Someday this is going to hurt, I thought as I listened to his voice, but at the moment I wish he were dead.

To not have a father! To not have to feel badly about both loving him and wishing he were dead! Oh! The freedom!!

For a while when I was on MDMA, I was in the mud like a soldier in the photos you see of World War II, the bodies, both dead and alive, caked with mud, legs sunk in it, weapons and faces filthy. There was mud in my heart, in my throat. My body was full of it. The mud was making it hard to breathe and soon, I knew, I would be dead. This was terrifying, to witness myself the moment before I could no longer breathe.

What am I going to do? I asked my therapist.

Stay with it, they said. I’ve never worked with an adoptee who didn’t die, they said.

I had a thought. This wasn’t mud! This was the fluid that was inside my mother! My brain quickly made a story so I didn’t have to die. My mother and father had gotten together and made me for a reason—the universe steered them to this act of conception so that I could be created—I was not a body choking on mud, after all! I was a star! A golden, five-pointed star that grew inside my mother, poking her, and then there I was, up in the sky, a star!

What would have happened if you’d stayed in the mud? my therapist asked. Oh my god, I said, thinking about it. I would be a body. I would be myself.

The mud wasn’t going to kill me. It was telling me something.

I’m angry because it’s been over two weeks since I took MDMA and psilocybin and the outer world is shouldering into my space.

I cried for three days before starting this book. I could write it or I could not write it, and neither choice felt safe or good. Either way, I was still faced with figuring out how to live my life in this body with this mind that feels like its primary purpose is to make my life harder than it has to be.

Either way—if I wrote this book or if I didn’t--I was still going to be myself, and “myself” was not working all that well for me, big picture. “Myself” felt like a car that was running out of gas. “Myself” was sorry for all the harm she had caused. “Myself” was afraid of how her brain increasingly felt sprayed with Teflon. “Myself” wanted a chance to catch her breath so she could see what in her life was actually “myself” and what was thrashing in the water, trying not to drown? And what, while I was at it, was sheer boredom?

“Myself”, also, let’s not forget, was spraying “me” with toxic chemicals night and day, and “I” really, really, really needed “myself” to stop.

It’s complicated when you are both the protagonist and antagonist in your own story, your own life.

Weeks after taking MDMA, I’m still having visions. This morning I lay in bed and tried find a way to describe how I was feeling, and I imagined a hand shoved up my backside, travelling all the way into my head, like the arm of a puppeteer.  I imagined that sometimes the hand squeezed my brain, sometimes the back of my eyes, sometimes my tongue, my throat, my heart, my lungs, my stomach, my self-confidence, my intestines, my bladder, my will, my bowels. Sometimes, almost any time I was standing around talking to someone, the hand travelled back up to my head and spun my brain until all I wanted to do was stop conversing and lie down so I could get my bearings. Sometimes, mercifully, the hand went away, and those were the moments that showed me what being alive without interference could feel like—free, easy, peaceful, simple.

I have too much trauma that is not mine in my body. My birth mother’s. My adoptive mother’s. My adoptive father’s. Who knows—maybe I have some of my foster parents’ trauma in me. Whoever they are.

Tinder

It has been eight months since I kissed a man. The days add up. In my forties, I’d never been able to tolerate this kind of physical desert. I have a dog now, and I guess that helps because at least it’s not that I don’t touch another living creature. My daughter taught my dog “kiss” and now he licks my face, sometimes rolls his tongue up like a licking ninja and quickly gets into my nose. Actually, I realized my daughter trained me. After my dog licks my face or nose, afterwards I say, “Nice kiss.”

Yeah, But

Why do I keep crying? I’ll be making dinner, sitting down to write, heading for the bathroom, and, out of nowhere, sobs.

Still?

Haven’t I grieved enough? How much does one body have to cry about losing its mother and sense of self?

Magic

I want to have the full range of marvelous thoughts my brainbody is capable of generating. I was careful to write marvelous because I don’t want to know the range of all darkness and rage and horror my brainbody can generate, but I sure would like to take a full body swim in grace and wonder and miracles and check out what life is like when I am in that place, which, I guess, is the very place I sit at the moment if only I were a little more aware.

Three Days

The three days I’ve been crying have also been the first three days of my no dairy, no sugar, no gluten diet the nutritionist suggest I try for a month when I went to her because I was tired of farting and of having a brain that felt like it was trying to suck energy out of a clogged straw.

She’s Coming Undone

It occurred to me as I lay on my bed the afternoon of Day 2 of No DSG Diet, that I felt like a blanket whose weave was loosening. I could feel my inner body coming undone. Part of me doesn’t understand why everyone doesn’t like to talk about pooping/poop as much as I do. For example, this coming undone reminds me of the moment when I’m sitting on the toilet and I can feel something loosen inside of my body, like a small sigh, that lets me know the wait is almost over and my body is getting ready to evacuate.

If we don’t relax, in other words, we can’t get rid of shit.

What the hell, then, is up with the popularity of busy? I’m so busy. He’s so busy. We’re all so busy. Busy means I don’t have time for you, or, oh, why oh why?, me. Busy means I’ve got a lot to do.

My fantasy? He’s holding me, kissing me, taking all the time in the world and I am there.

I’m Not a Doctor, But…

Here’s a theory I’ve recently come up with about my body:

When I was born, I went from being in my mother’s body, knowing her skin, my skin, to one set of hands to another until, finally, after ten weeks, I was in the hands of my new mother and father. These hands had access to all of me, head to toe. They held me, clothed me, washed me, diapered me. Their hands were everywhere on my body and my skin reacted, as one’s body does to sudden touch, by contracting. I imagine my sphincter pulling up, my toes curling, my shoulders rising. Because the touch kept happening, because there was no time to catch my breath and remember home in the body of the motherflesh, my body got stuck in activated. Thirty years later I’d be filling out the intake form at a chiropractor’s office, writing “Please make my skin one size bigger” under “Why are you here in our office today?”

My theory is that my fascia is wrapped extra tightly around my muscles, bones, and tendons, ligaments, and organs in my brain’s surprise that strangers confused my flesh for their own.

Buying a baby, signing papers for a baby, stealing a baby, is not the same as making a baby in your body.

Which part of that is hard to understand?

My body wants to know.

Peloton

Tunde helps me live in my body—I won’t take classes led by anyone else because they aren’t her. Sweating helps. Standing out of the seat, pushing, trying, breathing hard. Being told I can do it. Being told to not save anything, to use all I have. She is my spinning preacher. She makes me want to show up, high five the world, put on lipstick, and dance.

IG/Facebook

The closest I can get to safely putting myself into a coma and not committing to being a real self is by scrolling through other people’s lives, barely breathing as I pretend lying on the couch, moving only my hand, feels like a good way to spend significant chunks of my day.

Writing Prompt

“Twenty things I haven’t told you.”

1.     Who is the “you” you’re addressing?

2.     List the twenty things; develop each one into a story, and then string the stories together like beads, in whatever order pleases you. Read the whole thing out loud and see what you think.

What MDMA Showed Me

My body knows what it feels like to die. For a day and a half after coming out of the chair, my jaw hung open I could not believe that much pain had been in my body. Even more incredible, perhaps, was the fact that the pain was optional. There had been a way for me to get it out. The fact that adoptees, war vets, sexual abuse victims, etc etc etc have to spend their lives carrying something a pill and a therapist could possibly help mitigate and dispel made the pain seem criminal to me. We as a society are guilty if these people are suffering when they do not have to.

The Things They Carried

I knew the medicine was coming alive in my brain when I felt my body begin to lift out of the chair. “It’s starting,” I said to my therapist. I thought of a very thin woman I’d seen while I was walking my dog that morning. She’d been speeding along like she was trying to burn off calories she hadn’t even eaten yet. Her legs were like arms and looking at her exhausted me. So much effort to be skeletal. I told my therapist about the woman. “I don’t want to be like her,” I said.

I didn’t want to be talking about this woman. Why was I bringing her into the room? “I’m out of my body,” I said. “I’m outside it looking at that woman instead of being in my body feeling what this is like. I’m outside of my body so I can talk to you.” I had the feeling I was supposed to entertain my therapist, tell her the stories that were in my head even when they didn’t feel important to me. This was what I’d done my whole life: I would experience something and then think of ways I could package it so I could present it to others as a way to earn my right to take up space.

“What happens when you stay in your body?” my therapist asked.

I felt myself on the back of a horse, leaning forward to hold onto its neck. “This is what it is to be alive,” I said. “Me on a horse, having the experience, not having to tell anyone about it.” I was feeling the horse’s energy and my energy as we merged into one body. I could use my energy to be 100% present to the experience instead of being on the horse and thinking about how I could tell someone else about it. I could keep the experience inside and feel it. Be it. It was as if someone had given me a piece of gum and instead of keeping their fingers on one end as I tried to chew it, they let me have the whole piece.

In my mind, I sat up on the horse so my body and its body were no longer one. This felt like the way I was “supposed” to be. Less wild. More in control. This felt like life as I knew it. I felt increasingly stiff, and the horse faded away.

I found myself in mud. “I’m a soldier,” I kept saying, my arms stiff by my side. I turned my body back and forth like a stick trying to move forward. “I’m a fucking soldier. I do what they want. I’m a fucking soldier.”

“I’m stuck in the mud,” I said. It was like I was in the midst of a Civil War battle after a rainy week. I was filthy, almost buried in the field of mud. My mouth was full of mud. My throat. My heart. My body. The mud was rising inside of me, and I knew death was close for soon I would not be able to breathe.

Six years earlier, my writing partner Antonia Bogdanovich and I had been working on a scene where the protagonist, Samuel, was performing in front of a small audience. I didn’t know what he should say—I did not have Samuel’s language in my head—but what I came up with was something like, “We come from dirt, and it is dirt we return to,” because at the time it was the truest thing I could think of. I have felt dirty almost all of my life. Dirty as in: not right, not acceptable, not clean, shameful. I feel dirty in a way that makes me feel not feminine “enough”. I feel dirty in a way that makes me feel no one not dirty himself would want to make love to me. I feel dirty in a way that makes it hard for me to imagine myself a success in the world.

I imagine that when I was born and went to bodies that were not my mother’s body, I felt wrong in my skin and mind. What if “dirty” is a metaphor for “not at home”? What if “mud” is “not me”?

What does it mean to feel clean?

The Story That Keeps Me Stuck

You were not wanted when you came into the world.

Bringing a child into the world who has this story lodged into their brain is like slapping someone hard across the face almost every time you say you love them.

The Path You Were Put On

As an adoptee, of course I’m going to try to self-destruct.

What I might not know, and for sure what almost all people around me won’t know, is that self-destruction for an adopted person could be compared to a chick busting its way out of an egg.

The Scales are Tipped

If you had a room of 100 adopted people, and you asked them how many struggled with money issues, I’d feel confident in betting that at least 85% would raise their hands. I would bet the same 85% if I asked the same 100 adoptees how many had gut issues.

I have a theory. I’ll introduce it by talking about goldfish. Normally, when you buy a live goldfish at a store, it is taken out of its tank with a scoop along with enough of the tank’s water to fill a plastic bag so the goldfish can go to its new home still swimming in the water of its old home. The protocol is for the new owner to put the plastic bagged goldfish in their tank and to leave it for a few hours so the water in the bag and meet the temperature of the water outside the bag. This way, when they finally let the fish free, it will feel at home and not die of shock. It doesn’t die because its insides have had time to acclimate to its new outside world.

When you take a baby from its mother, there is no acclimation process, at least not one I have seen or heard of. Essentially, you’re taking a goldfish from one tank and dropping it into another. What would kill a fish, I am arguing, causes mayhem in the internal life of a human.

I picture a set of scales, one arm in the baby, one arm out. When the baby is separated from the mother, the arm inside the belly is weighted down as if it’s holding, say, fifty pounds, while the arm outside holds no load. The infant’s body has a sense of deep imbalance. What is inside it does not equal what is outside it.

What I found, as an adoptee, is that I have spent my entire life trying to get these scales balanced. Why? Why does the fish want the water from its old tank to be the same temperature as the new tank it is entering? Why do we want our left leg to be the same length as our right leg? Why when you do 20 bicep curls on the right side do you do 20 bicep curls on the left side? Why do you sleep on a mattress for a certain length of time, six months?, and then flip it over and sleep on it for the same amount of time? We have a left side of the brain and a right side of the brain. We have day and night.

When we are out of balance—when we sweat more water than we drink, for example, our well-being is at risk.

I think my body has been telling me I’m at risk all my life because my body can’t find balance between what is inside of me and the world outside of me.

If, in my brain, mother separation equals pain that feels like dying, and yet I have entered a world that Hallmark card’s loss and interprets the same separation as an occurrence based on love and gain—a couple or a person who desperately wanted a child now gets one and you, the child, get a home where you are wanted and much loved (the part where you were a mistake or unwanted or stolen often gets swept under a rug because there is no Hallmark card for devastation).

This is what trying to balance the scales looks like:

1.     As an infant: If I drink my bottle as fast as possible, maybe the scales will tip in my favor and she’ll return.

2.     As a child: If I steal my schoolmates’ lunches, maybe the weight of their lunchboxes will even out the scales.

3.     As a teenager: If I drink this bottle of vodka, maybe I’ll feel like I’m a real person.

4.     As a college student: If I get all As, maybe I’ll be perfect enough to feel right.

5.     As an adult: If I keep busy, maybe the fact that I always feel uncomfortable and somehow wrong will magically change.

Spending money and buying things is one way to try to weigh down the outside scale to match the heaviness you feel inside. That way, you also get the anxiety of watching yourself have no self-control when it comes to your own resources and the outside scale gets to be as weighted and dark as the inside scale. Both sides tell you: You are in so much trouble.

This way, both you and the world get to see you’re in trouble. The problem is that both you and the world tend to have no idea you may well have gotten yourself into this situation as an unconscious desire to act out the trauma of your early mother-separation. Your family and friends probably think you need to do a better job of being an adult, and they have no idea you’re doing what your body tells you to do: get those scales balanced.

Remember in Good Will Hunting when the therapist, Robin Williams, keeps repeating to Matt Damon’s character. Will, It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.? Of course Will was a genius fuck-up. He’d been abandoned in so many ways as a child. He was just out in the world, trying to get his life to match his inside one—chaos—so his body could rest with a sense of (agonizing) balance.

We want what we knew when we were young. Kick the shit out of a baby and then see what kind of romantic partners that baby chooses as an adult. Chances are good, without a lot of self-study and therapy, that grown-up baby is going to get the shit kicked out of it in one way or another just so it can feel at home.

You Are Perfect

I tried never sitting still; I tried staying in bed, driving across the country, dropping out of school, going back to school, getting married, getting divorced, getting married, getting divorced, living on a farm, living by the beach. I tried working office jobs, teaching in colleges, serving people ice cream cones. I tried black hair, brown hair, blonde hair, short hair, long hair. I tried yoga. I tried running, biking, walking in the woods. Every day was about waking up and trying.

Mostly I resorted to caffeine’s ability to lift me out of the swamp of my mind and chuck me into the spin of get things done so you can feel alright about yourself.

Last November, I went to the emergency room because I knew in my bones I was dying. I was there for hours, and the kind, masked doctor had twelve vials of blood drawn for various tests until, finally, he had an orderly wheel me into a room on the other side of the hospital so they could look at my brain.

All was fine.

A week later I made a video appointment with the first available doctor at Kaiser, and I told her, triumphantly, I’d found the problem. I lifted my shirt and twisted around so she could see the red dot I was pointing to on my back.

“I have a shingle,” I told her.

She looked shocked and annoyed. “I looked at your test results from last week,” she said. “All your numbers are good. Better than good. All your numbers are perfect. There is nothing wrong with you,” she said. “No one has a shingle. That’s probably a bug bite.”

I thought about the fact that my numbers were perfect, and I tried to feel happy (perfect!), but something was not right. Having perfect numbers was not great news for someone who just wanted to know what was wrong. I wondered what had bitten me. This was when I lived on the farm. I wondered if it was something poisonous.

I thanked the doctor. “Enjoy your life,” she told me. “You’re one of the lucky ones.”

Bet You Didn’t See This Coming

Part of me believes babies who are separated from their mothers should be lined up against a wall behind the hospital and shot. You might be doing the mothers a favor, too, in the long run if you shot them while you were at it. At least then the mothers and babies could be together.

I mean, sorry, but life is hard to fully embrace when your brain and body tell you, with often maliciously bad timing (after a wonderful date, for example, or while you are eating a yummy slice of cake), you should be dead. With no warning, the body memory of motherloss can turn a pleasant car ride to the grocery story into a seemingly bottomless pit of grief.

Who would pull the trigger? you ask. You say no one would sign up for a job like that.

I beg to differ. I mean, come on. Look at all those folks who had zero problem pulling the children from their parents at the U.S. border in Mexico. Look at the people who go into malls and open fire. Come on! You could probably charge people for the privilege of shooting the babies and mothers.

Half of those people just might be adopted.

Not Nice

I am so tired of living in a world that thinks it’s more important to keep puppies and kittens with their mothers for eight weeks than it is to keep a child with its mother for at least that long.

 Oh My God

I finally figured out how to clear the Etch-a-Sketch of me. Change the narrative, and, most importantly, change the narrator.

I’d Rather Not

I don’t feel like—Yay! I get to change my name! Yay! I get to reinvent myself! I feel like—I’d rather lie on the couch and watch Chef’s Table because then I’m not putting myself at any risk.

If I try to peel back what isn’t true to figure out what is true about living in an adopted body and you don’t like what I have to say, well, won’t that be like me being born all over again and not being wanted?

Unlikable

What I learned as a writer is that it’s crucial for the success of story that its main character be likable.

I know what it’s like to present my work and not be liked. I know what it’s like to have members in a group of adoptees say, Not her.

Toughen Up

One reason I’m so committed to helping the (now retired) Harvard woman’s basketball coach write a book about her life and work is that I want to learn how to be more like a D-1 athlete and less like..the way I am. I mean, I watched the Netflix series The Last Dance at least three times. I didn’t know I loved Michael Jordan until I started sobbing as he led Chicago to a near-win over the Celtics in the X.

He played fearlessly, joyfully, single-mindedly, with every intention of winning.

I would like to live like that. Why do I think I need permission? Who do I think I’m supposed to ask?

You?

My mother(s)?

Hahahaha

I have gone twice to a massage therapist who focuses on the fascia. It’s like her hands are magic keys that slide open doors I did not know were in, on, my body. The other day she slid open a door as she pushed one hand up the right side of my neck and one hand down towards my shoulder. My head bent towards my left shoulder, and visions poured into my mind. I pointed to my head after a few moments and said, “Inside here, I am laughing my head off.” She laughed, and then I laughed, and then she laughed more and said, “Literally,” and then I really started laughing as I imagined myself walking out of her office, headless, with a stick for a neck. I told her my vision and said it would be terrible advertising for her business for me to walk out her door, headless. “I’ll put your head on a stake in my garden,” she said. I laughed, delighted. That was so sick! Clearly, this was a room where I could say anything.

Love/Love

For me, being an adoptee has felt like being someone who wanders the world looking for a partner, a tennis racket dangling by my side because no one can hit it like I do, fiercely and competitively with sudden breaks for physical and/or mental collapse and tears.

When I met Pam Cordano, that all changed.

Put a Ring On It

Pam had heard me interviewed on Haley Radke’s podcast Adoptees On, and she contacted me because she wanted to do my one-on-one Write or Die class over the phone. In the first five minutes of our conversation, Pam said something about wanting to marry me. She was funny and high-energy, and I wasn’t sure if she was kidding, but I felt a duty to not get side-tracked by explaining that I was straight and going down that whole but thanks for asking road, so I said we could talk about that at the end of the call.

Let’s Skip to the End

Within five minutes of meeting Pam in person weeks later, I told her something about me I was so ashamed about I had told almost no one.

Luckily for me, she is a therapist and was able to skillfully handle this social gaffe. She said something along the lines of, “Hold on. You just met me and you are telling me this secret thing? Let’s not gloss over this. It’s important.” I had to catch my breath, swallow my anxiety, and think for a moment. “I guess I want to get the leaving over with,” I said.

We talked. We laughed. We drew pictures of the lives we wanted to have five years from that day.

She stayed.

Boy, making and keeping friends when you are adopted and hard-wired to look for and expect abandonment is so flipping hard. It’s like having only hard-boiled eggs available for meals, knowing that some have explosives instead of whites and yolks inside, and the only way you are going to know is to crack the shell. You sit down to the table and pray and have mysterious pains in your guts and head that no one can explain because no one knows about the eggs because they never think to ask what you had to eat the day before.