In You Don’t Look Adopted, I wrote that in my life I felt as if I had one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. This is both a mind and a body sensation—the drive to move forward along with the need to slow down or stop happens both in my body and in my mind. It’s not fun. It’s like trying to win a marathon but compulsively taking two steps backwards for every four steps forward. Number one, as a runner, you wonder why the hell you are doing this, and the spectators lining the course wonder why the hell you are doing that, and none of you has an answer. You’re trying to win but you are clearly getting in your own way.

This, I think, is what happens to your mind-body connection when you are born, relinquished, given or sold to a new family: I think upon the initial separation from the mother’s body and presence, the body goes into chaos. It is programmed to climb up the body that is also in the baby’s mind still part of the baby’s body and attach to the breast that is also the baby’s body and address the stomach and guts that are crying out to be filled. The baby’s body is programmed to connect to the mother’s body outside of the womb. So many things that are set up to help this baby’s body exist and flourish don’t happen when a baby is separated from their mother, and, for me at least, this showed up in later years as an inability to do something that others seemed to consider basic advice: to follow my gut.

My gut told me, almost always some message or another along the lines of I was in trouble; the other shoe was about to drop; my gut was empty and needed filling; I was fundamentally wrong; the people around me were fundamentally wrong; something was wrong with almost everything, and since I was the common denominator, the problem must be me.

My gut was had its foot both on the gas and the brake: Run. Don’t exist.

My mind was in heaven making up stories to explain the feelings in my gut. I was at a family picnic and my gut told me to run? My brain got to work: You don’t belong here. You need to move across the country. You can reinvent yourself there and finally feel real. I looked into the mirror and my guts sank. My brain got to work. Look at you. Yuck. Who could ever love a face like that? You are in so much trouble. A face like that will lead to a lonely life.

My brain doesn’t know how to read what my gut is saying because the connections between the feelings in my gut and reality were never explained, validated, or mirrored for me when I was growing up. Even when I went to therapy, the therapists weren’t deeply helpful because the topic of adoption never came up. It is only now that I am learning the language of the gut. I’m learning what no feels like, what yes feels like, what uncertainty feels like. I’m learning to listen less to the stories my mind is quick to provide and to allow the weather of my body and guts to have its full expression with me there to pay attention. It’s so strange to not try to explain to myself and others why I feel the way I do and to just feel. It makes me think that maybe this is one reason I stole when I was a kid—it’s a strange connection to make, but I think there was a wild clarity in stealing I got to experience that I would have felt if I’d known how to truly hear my gut and react to what it was asking me to do.

I think being adopted as a kid can be like being with a partner you know you have to break up with, but you live in dread of hurting someone you love or care about. It’s not that I needed to break up with my parents and never see them, but I needed to break up with them to end the storyI am your daughter full stop. As much as I dread my father’s death, in some ways I can’t wait for the slate to be finally wiped clean. Finally the not-entirely-honest story will have come to an end, and maybe my guts will breathe a sigh of relief and tell my mind that everything is okay, or at least tell my mind that things are getting better because every day truth is walking more fully into the room.