Three Life-Changing Ideas I Had about Being Adopted While Listening to Podcasts and Driving 3,282 Miles
Our brain tells us to move our hand before we think about moving it. As with almost any fact, it seems, this made me think about what it’s like to be adopted. How many things are my brain telling me to do that come from a still-traumatized, still infantilized, still terrorized place? This is not a new thought for me, and yet it feels like it is. I mean, what if I’m living basically on autopilot as a baby who is in a meltdown because her mother disappeared? I mean, how many of the choices and actions I make are actually coming from soul-decisions that resonate with who I am, truly? My takeaway? Time to get serious about that meditation practice I never seem to pick up. Time to ramp up mindfulness and listen even more deeply to self. (Part of driving 17-hour days is that a person gets a little blurry around the edges—I have no idea what podcast I was listening to that gave me this thought.)
Dan Harris interviewed the mediation teacher Cara Lai about the year-long silent retreat she took by herself. She talked about having to face that she’d been using meditation to override actually paying attention to and caring for her body that was suffering from Lyme. She talked about having to grieve deeply, deeply about living in a body she could not control, living in a body that felt pain, a body that would eventually die. As an adult, Cara Lai was facing what I believe relinquished babies and children feel. We have no control over our bodies, and it is terrifying. I think many of us create coping mechanisms that can look like a shell, like a snail’s shell, to protect our soft animal body that loves its mother who is nowhere to be found. I think coming out of the fog is recognizing that what we thought was our self is actually a shell, and the stage after that, the stage I believe I am in now, is letting the shell break away and fall off. The world has the neatest way of confirming ideas that I have, and last night I picked a slug off the wall of my new house. Inside the house. On the kitchen wall. I have never, ever, ever, found a slug dallying inside my kitchen. Yet there it was, letting its soft animal body love my yellow wall. I might be saving the best for last here in this paragraph: at one point, Cara Lai said she didn’t want to heal, she wanted to be understood. (I may be misquoting her, but that’s what I remember.) That made me have the Emily Dickinson this-is-poetry feeling of the top of my head blowing off. That’s it! When the social worker who was interviewing me for a podcast asked when I thought I would be healed, I felt judged and wrong. Why is it my job to heal myself from something that I did not choose? Why can’t you, dear social worker, step in and meet me with open-minded curiosity instead of checking your watch to see how long I’ve been like this judgement? It’s so much work just to live. Why do I have to heal also? Why can’t I just be me?
Finally, I listened to Tim Ferriss interview football coach George Raveling who said that every day when his feet his the ground, he tells himself he has two choices to make: does he want to be happy or happier? Well, I thought that was nice for him, but I was adopted, so I needed the option of miserable. I was in the middle of nowhere in Nevada, and the road stretched on forever in front of me and behind me. I had to pee and Bird was between bouts of throwing up in the back seat. I was so uncomfortable, and it made no sense to my brain that I could only have two choices: happy or happier. I kept listening because I was interested in my attachment to misery. Misery was what connected me to my first mother—if I kept in contact with the misery I felt being separated from her, I think my brain believes, my she’ll come back. Or maybe my job was to be miserable since chances are good I was created in a soup of misery by a body that did not want me. Uh, what if I don’t want that job? What if I have personal power in this crazy mess of a situation? If I could only be happy or happier each day, I’d have to really show up as myself so that I could not store anger or fury or grief in my body. I thought about how happy doesn’t have to mean laughing or even smiling. I could be happy inside my body as I angrily told someone off, is what I thought. I could be happier if I wrote a book about adoption that felt true to me, real, important, even if the book itself was marked by deep grief, confusion, and frustration. Expressing these things can bring on deep satisfaction and even hilarity! I had had a lot of happiness writing You Don’t Look Adopted, that’s for sure. I had pirate happiness. The happiness of claiming my own ship and steering it where I wanted it to go. The more I thought about happy or happier, the happier I got. What a life that could be! I’d have to act in ways that would bring me happy or happier! I’d have to really listen to my heart! I’d have to really live in congruence with my morals! This was starting to feel like the Door B I’d been searching for a very long time.
Later, as I crossed the border into California, I cried tears of relief. I had made it. I felt happier. I thought about my brain and my body and how hard they have worked to help me find myself in this crazy world where people don’t understand what happens to a baby when they are separated from their mother and handed over (sold) to strangers, regardless of how loving and wonderful those stranger-parents may be (as mine were). I thought about the writing classes I have with adopted people, and how, 100% of the time, when they read their work out loud, I feel in the presence of something holy. I thought about how much pressure their voices have had to fight against in order to come out into the world fully expressed. When the people who raise you want you to be theirs and no one else’s, when the people who raise you don’t understand what happened to your brain, when the people who raise you want you to be theirs more than they want you to be yours, you learn to swallow your true voice because you soon find out that voice is not wanted or heard.
Until, that is, you are in community with other people who are adopted and you find that all they want to hear is the voice you learned to swallow. They are dying to hear it, and so you learn to cough up the diamonds of you. When you see the brightness in the eyes of those who hear you speak your coughed-up truths, you learn to, slowly by slowly, relax, you learn to let those diamonds fall out even as you feel drunk or crazy because the people around you are clapping their hands, their jaws are hanging open, they are saying YES YES YES to you, and so you keep going. You keep opening and opening until that shell has nowhere to go but down.
