Republishing To Be Real

Being adopted can make it seem easier to not exist than to exist.

I took a book I wrote, To Be Real, off the market after reading a lot of it in a recording studio. I got to the point when I couldn’t stand having the guy at the mixing board hearing me. It wasn’t so much that I was sick of reading. I was sick of exisiting. I was sick of thinking about what he was thinking about me.

Well, I was a little sick of reading. I was thinking, Come on, Anne. You are more than a sad girl who has a rough time with pretty much everything. You are fun. You are delightful. You are hilarious. You are strange in the best ways. You are, okay, let’s face it, weird. You are also so normal it’s painful to you. You are the queen of ordinary, shot through with gold, just like everyone around you.

Where’s that girl in your story?

She didn’t feel like she had permission to exist yet.

It took a full year for me to process my dad’s death. He died a week ago today. As the year anniversary came closer, I got sadder and sadder and sadder. This sadness was not new. It was a surprising guest that came to live with me when I moved into my beautiful house near the beach in Santa Cruz. I had everything I’d dreamed of—a place of my own near my daughter, Bird, work I loved, friends nearby, free time, money—and yet I was not happy.

This was scary. If everything I’d dreamed of did not make me happy, what was I supposed to do with the rest of my life?

 The day after he died, I was doing yoga and crying, and I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror. Oh no, I thought. That isn’t you. That pathetic, sad, old lady. Nope. You are a happy teenager. Where is she?

I didn’t know what to do because there was nowhere to go to run from myself. I’d been doing that my whole life and I’d finally run to where I’d said I’d be happy, and I was not.

So I sat down and faced myself in the mirror.

Hello, I said. I looked at her. You look sad. 

She nodded. She was afraid. She was sad and I was looking at her. She was so alone.

I did not want her to feel alone. I’m with you, I said. I won’t leave. I checked in with my heart and my feet to make sure that was true. It was. I was going to stay with her even though she did not look like any image on a magazine cover I’d ever seen. She did not look young or pretty or like she had a lot to offer.

She looked real. That scared me. It was sort of like being faced with steak tartare for the first time. I can eat that?  

If it is okay for me to be sad and not pretty and not a sweet little girl someone would not abandon, someone adoptable, then the world as I know it falls away. 

I do not know the world where I believe it is okay to be me.

Think about it: when your mother gives you up and strangers call themselves your mom and your dad and call you their daughter, the world is established: that is who you are now. You are not yourself. You are that.

When my dad died and joined my mother where dead people go, my role fell away. I was no one. This sounds like it could be an exciting time full of reinvention and possibility, but when you were made into a character near birth and don’t become real until you are almost 60, it’s more like a pit of despair.

For a year, apparently. I guess I hit the bottom of the pit, felt the feelings, and now get to step into me.

Whoa. Super trippy. Who needs drugs when you can wake up from being adopted?

To Be Real was edited, but it is full of typos and mistakes. That horrifies me, but on a deeper level, it pleases me because it feels true. That’s what writing looks like—a bunch of mistakes. I understand that people have their books edited to clean out all errors so the reader does not have to be stumble, but the truth is, I want the reader to stumble. I want to create work that recreates the state of my brain as closely as possible in my desire to have others see just what being adopted feels like. Reading To Be Real as it is is the closest I can come to being real with you in the effort of existing in the world as myself.

That’s why I do the work I do as a writing coach. Really I’m more of a self doula. I just use writing as a tool to help true selves emerge. I want to see other people’s real selves as much as I want to see my own. Think about it: I didn’t ever get to see my mom or dad’s real selves because they had created characters for themselves in my life that weren’t entirely true. I ache for real. For connection. For safety. For love. If I don’t show up as my real self, how can I possibly be present enough to witness those of others?

So To Be Real is back on the market.

I am eternally grateful to the people whose names are on the back of the book. You are the real deal, HannahSally, Dawn, Leah, Brad, Shelley, Sharon, Andrew, Tonni, Kathleen, Elisa, Kristen, Kimberly. I never would have done this without you. For real.