I took To Be Real, the sequel to You Don’t Look Adopted off the market after I spent seven hours in the recording studio reading it for the Audible version. I kept saying to the guy at the controls, Is this over yet?The words kept on going and going and going. Every time the narrator (me!) could choose between going left and sounding run over by a car and going right and sounding…what? normal, fine, happy, like an embodied, complicated person?, she (I!) bore left, hard.

She was boring me, was the problem. I wanted her to put on her pirate hat, strap on her eye patch, and go find her goddamn boat and have an adventure. She didn’t have to be happy or fine, I just wanted her to sound vital, aware that she had choices.

This put me into a funk for about a month. I felt too tired, too worn down to deal with choices. But worn down by what, exactly? Why tired? I had not problems sleeping. I took naps even. I wasn’t eating much junk food. I exercised consistently but not overly.

I walked around feeling trapped by my story, and my story was that I could not succeed in the world financially. This was like having someone suck the gas out of my car every day and me wondering why my car couldn’t make it out of the garage. The irony—one irony—was that I had more money in the bank than I’d ever had. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t enough to allay the fear that I’d fuck up and lost it all.

I like to blame adoption for everything (and, yes, I’ve learned to be greateful for all it has given me, truly, deep in my soul—for what applies seemingly merciless pressure can, in fact, make people and things great), and I’d like to blame it for my attitude towards money. Wasn’t I formed inside a body who was thinking there’s not enough money to keep this baby? Was I not created from a sense of lack? Was I not enough in myself for my mother to keep me? I mean, come on, was I not hard-wired to become either a money hoarder or a money blower?

How do you at 59 years old change life-long stories you carry in dark places of your brain you don’t even know about?

You (I) get help.

If I have fears but don’t talk about the honestly and seek out support, how will I not simply spin in my own shit until I die?

The thing, I have found, is to reach out for help when you (I) believe you can’t be helped. 

At some Tony Robbins events, people are trained to work with their mind and belief systems so they are able to actually walk across hot coals without feeling pain or getting burned.

Asking for help when you believe you are beyond help can require the same kind of diligent and purposeful faith in the power of what is possible. That is a ridiculous sentence. Essentially it says asking for help when you believe you are beyond help requires you to believe you can be helped. 

Hahahaha. Good thing this post was free for you to read because it’s offering nothing of help at this point.

That’s where the hilarity of hope comes in and how powerful even the barest scrapings of faith are.

More soon.