Dear Joe Hudson,

Dear Joe. And I mean that: Dear Joe. (I have a friend who also watches your YouTube videos and who calls you our Joe.)

Today I get to see you live on Zoom during our final Connection Course meeting where you will answer questions and do some rapid-fire coaching. I can only imagine how many people are praying they will be the ones to get coached, to have some tight knot in their belief system suddenly loosened and freed.

My favorite moments of the coaching sessions I watch you do on Youtube are the moments when a question you ask stops the person’s mind for a long moment, and then something shifts and bright laughter comes along with the new insight. Hahahahaha. Look at how mistaken I was! Look at how much freedom is available to me!

When I first discovered these videos, it felt like the first time I tasted a potato chip. Oh! I am going to eat this whole bag because they are so delicious! The difference was that I didn’t feel sick after watching the sessions. I felt inspired, hopeful, and deeply curious. What misheld beliefs were directing the ship of me? What beliefs did I hold as truths that were actually creating tension and separation in my life?

These were not new thoughts for me, but they were intensified as was the hope that by finding and asking the right questions of myself, I could open my mind to new ways of being in the world, more generous, more trusting, more fun.

I have a question for you, but it feels unformed, long and unwieldy, and so I will work at asking it here because I would like to see it spelled out as it is a mess in my mind.

I have made a living of believing that because I was separated from my mother at birth and then adopted, I am different from most people. Wounded. Dare I say, a victim of circumstances (even though I was adopted by loving parents). I believe in my preverbal trauma. I believe the body keeps the score. I believe I am not living a truly authentic life because I don’t have a sense of who I actually am because, for example, my birth name and the names of my birth parents on my original birth certificate were changed. I do believe that my parents couldn’t see me for who I was because they saw me as their own. I do believe I am outside the circles of mainstream belonging, and that people who aren’t like me cannot understand me.

I wrote a book about these feelings, and then I created groups where I teach others like me to write their beliefs and stories about being relinquished and adopted, too. Sometimes people in my groups refer to people who weren’t adopted as Muggles. There is us, and then there are the Muggles. I actually squirm with discomfort when I hear this term because the delineation is so black and white, but that is the culture I have immersed myself in—there is us, and there is you all. You don’t get us, and when we try to tell you about how we feel, you tell us we were lucky to be adopted and that most people feel the way we do, anyway.

We hate hearing those things because we know you are wrong.

Adopted people have a higher rate of suicide, incarceration, and mental health issues than, okay, whatever, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em—Muggles do. I, for example, am the only one of my childhood friends who dropped out of college three times. I’m not sure how many of them have moved over 40 times, were married and divorced twice (probably a fair amount), who still, as an adult, scans crowds looking for someone who might be their mother, and who carries a grief around with them that tells them something is wrong even during holidays and days when there is not a cloud in the sky.

In your course, again and again I was put into a breakout room with one other person so we could do the exercises, or experiments I think you call them, you taught us on the video my partner and I watched together. We looked at each other without speaking for several minutes. We learned to ask how/what questions of each other. We learned to observe our own assumptions and agendas when listening to others. I won’t say everything because if people want to know what I learned, they should take the course and learn it right. What happened each time was connection. By approaching a conversation with vulnerability, impartiality, empathy, and wonder, as you taught us, we create space for connection to organically emerge. It feels amazing and also, uh, vulnerable. After class I would almost run to the bakery downtown and buy a giant chocolate chip cookie to feed some ache in me that called for old coping mechanisms now.

(I did not do this the last class, however. I was able instead to walk and feel the ache that had come from stretching my ability to see and be seen. )

Baby steps.

So, finally, here’s my attempt to nail my question(s): Is it possible that the stories I tell myself about my past are motes in my eye that prevent me from seeing the full possibility of connection? Is it possible that vulnerable, impartial, empathetic, wonder-filled present-moment connections run such high energy through my system that they create new possibilities, new neural connections in my brain that would allow both the old stories to be and new stories to emerge?

And, to get to the even bigger question, the one I am afraid to ask: Does almost everyone feel the way I do—cut off from family, society, different, fundamentally not okay or wrong? Is this state of deep discomfort and self-disregard what most people walk around with? Is this why so many people flock to watch your videos and take your classes, because they are as desperate to connect and belong as adopted people are?

Are the Muggles right? Are we all the same?

I have to acknowledge the part of me that is making my hands go cold. No!!! it is screaming. We lost our mothers! Our culture! Our lineage! Our true storyline! Fuck you, Anne, for even asking such a stupid, self-dismissing question. You are abandoning us and yourself, too, with this line of thinking. Stop it!

I wrote in my book You Don’t Look Adopted that I think of adoption as the human experience, intensified. What adopted people know is what it is like to lose connection. Granted, everyone emerges from a mother and loses the connection to the mother by the umbilical cord after it is cut. They lose the two-bodies-in-one-body life inside of the mother to emerge into a my body-your body life. It’s just that adoptees emerge into a my-body (no body) life where connection has disappeared before we even know what it tastes like.

Dear Joe, I have finally realized what my true question is: Can I have it all? Can I have the knowing that I was forever altered by relinquishment and adoption, and can I know that I am not as alone as I think I am in this grief, and that, as weird and as stubborn as I am, I can connect with others, all others—with humanity, whole-ly? As if, because, we are the same? Do people generally have this deep sadness in them that bubbles up no matter the circumstances?

Love,

your Anne