The other day in my writing class for adopted people, someone requested we write about anger. I loved this request. Anger, I think, is for so many people truth telling, and the writing manifested from people diving into what they often avoid is generally powerful, surprising, and sometimes very funny.

For a long time, I had confused the deep urge to expresss myself and live with anger or depression or trouble. I have come to realize the tension I often feel in my body, like the tension in the string an archer has drawn back before releasing the arrow so it can fly, is not anger but my will to exist and show up and be in my body and communicate clearly. I confused this feeling with anger because of fear—if, in the past, I’ve existed, shown up, been in my body, communicated and was then in some way misunderstood or ignored, it’s like the flow of energy gets bottled up, tucked away, repressed, and, in the future, this blocked energy makes expressing the pure energy of existing complicated, painful, not easy. It can hurt to want to say something to someone, but to have your subconscious screaming at you IT’S NOT GOING TO WORK.

It’s like running down the stretch to do the long jump, and having some giant being from above smash you down with a fly swatter just as you leap. It’s going to me hard to leap freely in the future!

It’s like your uncle molesting you and your mother saying you imagined it when you gather up the courage to tell her when you were young. (To be clear, this is an example from the world, not my life. I’ve heard stories like this from so, so many adoptees. It’s shocking.)

Anger is a good word: a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility. As with so many words associated with existing as an adoptee, I think the word “anger” is used to describe emotions that are stronger and more destabilizing.

I turned to Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart for some ideas, and I found it all I needed for one class in the word anguish. This is a word I know but rarely use. Maybe it’s because I didn’t hear it used that much around me. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because just saying it evokes a dark feeling, and so it’s an easy word to avoid.

On the show, Brené defined anguish as A mix of shock, incredulity, grief, and powerlessness. Powerlessness is particularly painful. Coming back to our bodies can be difficult after experiencing anguish. To make sure I really heard what she was saying, I looked up the word incredulity, because I had the feeling I was going to learn something. One definition of incredulity is the state of being unwilling or unable to believe something.

Well, goddamn. There it is—I’m pretty sure many adoptees (and first mothers) would agree that all of those words: anguish, grief, incredulity, and grief could all be used repeatedly to talk about what it feels like to be, for example, relinquished, adopted, to come out of the fog, to have reunions be refused or to have them go south.

To illustrate anguish, Brené showed a painting called (in English) Anguish by August Friedrich Schenck. It shows a mother sheep standing over a dead ewe and visibly mourning the death in a bleak winter scene, a murder of crows surrounding the mother and baby. As we were talking about this painting in my class, a woman who’s always on top of things googled this painting and brought our attention to a later painting Schenck had created called (in English) The Orphan. In this version of the scene, the grieving ewe stands by the dead mother, and the crows and the bleak winter again set the stage for this scene.

Just in case we hadn’t gotten what anguish felt like after the first image, we got a second shot at it.

This is worth attention, the artist is saying, just as adoptees are saying, This is worth attention, as they try to find the courage, sometimes, many times, to share with you their story.

On the show Brené said, “Poets, artists and writers approach the topic of anguish without apology, often capturing it in a way that leaves us with a sense of shock, heartbreak, and foreboding.”

All you have to do is watch Sophie’s Choice once to understand the meaning of anguish. Once, when my daughter was young, she was watching Zero Dark Thirty with me. There was a waterboarding scene, and I wanted to turn off the TV. I was crying, but my daughter was paying deep attention to the screen. “No,” she said. I forget her exact words, but she said something along the lines of needing to see what happened in order to know what goes on in the world. I still don’t know if I did the right thing by letting the movie play. How young is too young to see cruelty and anguish? How young is too young to feel anguish?

Many adoptees—I—many first mothers—will tell you that to feel the anguish of mother/baby separation is life-changing in a way that losing a leg is, or both legs along with your sense of well-being and self. If we use words such as anger or fear in place of a word like anguish in a situation such as this, we miss the mark. By infinity.

If I can’t tell you how I feel, how can you know who I am? How can I know who I am?