Chapter One of My New Book, To Be Real
The other day some social workers were talking to me about You Don’t Look Adopted. One of the women asked, When do you think you’ll heal? My ears started to feel closed the way they do before I’m going to pass out. I took small breaths and worked to collect myself. I never know what’s going to trigger me. I’ve been asked this question before. I’ve asked it of myself thousands of times, but today felt different.
The day before I’d been lying in the hammock, and a tiny black fly came into view and hovered in front of my face. I watched this black dot watch me. What a creature! It can fly! It exists the way I exist—we’re born, we do our thing, we die. How many times have I flicked a fly like this away from me? How many have I smooshed it, killed it with no thought except, Phew. That pest is gone?
It’s as alive as I am.
It didn’t ask to be a fly just as I didn’t ask to be a human, just as I didn’t ask to be a female or ask to be given up by my mother and then adopted. That fly that’s in front of my face is 100% living out its best life. I, on the hammock, watching the fly with what feels like 100% of my attention and being, am also living my best life.
I do not need to heal. I am not broken.
You did not break me. I will not give you that power because the assumption then is you are better than I am because you are not damaged, but I am, and that perhaps you have what I need: the secret to my health.
Byron Katie says there are three kinds of business: my business, your business, and god’s business. Asking when I am going to heal sounds like a your business kind of thing. What I mean is, what would happen if instead of asking me when I’m going to heal, you ask yourself, When am I going to heal?
You can’t send people off to war or take them away from their mother and expect them to remain unchanged. I’m not damaged. I’m different. I don’t want the damaged narrative anymore. I did at one point because it was a way of trying to find and ground myself in my body and in this culture, but now I see the narrative of the wounded adoptee puts all the power in the culture’s corner and none in mine. The general population want adoptees to be wounded so we can’t use the full force of our voices and be heard, respected, and understood. You undermine our agency by saying there is something wrong with us when, let’s be honest, if there’s something wrong with anybody, it’s with a culture that thinks you can separate a mother and child, have money pass hands when new parents legally claim (buy) the child, and think that’s a healthy and ethical way to treat a body.
I am a walking, talking, lying-down-and-looking-at-a-bug example of what happens when you take a baby away from its mother. What I am is the truth.
I tried for so long to be anything else so you would listen to me, keep me, love me.
Fake is no fun. It’s expensive, exhausting, and life-sucking.
Real is walking a tightrope that’s actually on the ground.
It’s so easy. You just do it.
Watch me go.
