Square One, Adoption, and Finding Out You Are a Goddamn Giraffe

What I really want to tell you about Square One, about the stage in the change cycle where the caterpillar is soup and has no idea they are going to become a butterfly because they have no ideas unless soup can dream is that I think being an adoptee, for me, has been 60 years of, on some levels, a stage I never grew out of.

In my late teens and twenties, when I was in a pattern of dropping out of college and getting and quitting jobs, I used to hate when people would say things such as, “You love books. Maybe you could work in a bookstore,” or “Maybe you could deliver mail since you love walking so much.”

These suggestions felt invasive and gross. If I didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself, how was someone else going to know better? I loved books because I didn’t work in a bookstore. I loved walking because I wasn’t delivering mail. To commodify my loves was to assume that my joys weren’t important enough to exist on their own.

It's so confusing to try to find your purpose and sense of self worth when you bend down to look at your roots and you see nothing because it was determined your roots weren’t important enough to note or share. To you kept people, this may sound like freedom, but as Martha Beck taught us in the Wayfinder course, a bird can fly because it has something to push against. If the branch the bird was launching from fell back as the bird pushed off, the launch would not have and force. You who know your roots and push against them have torque. I who do not know my roots am pushing against air if I try to rebel, try to determine who I am through my own actions.

Do you know what I mean?

If we go into Square One after a catalytic event that changes life for us, I would say birth is a catalytic event for the baby (and the mother, of course, but, Happy Mother’s Day, I’m not focusing on her here today). The baby, then goes from a fetus that lived inside someone else’s body to a baby that lives inside only its own body. Humanity soup. Who am I now that someone else’s skin doesn’t separate me from the world? Who am I when I don’t know I’m a separate creature yet, and won’t know this for months? For all its life this new creature has been able to reach out and touch the walls of the mother, and now, if this new creature is born and then separated from its mother, the only thing the new creature touches is not-mother.

This sounds very Square One. Very here but not here.

If you want to create a creature that lives in a semi-dissociated state much of the time with alarms going off in their body warning that bad things are happening or about to happen 24/7, believe a baby is a blank slate and steal it or sell it or give it away and tell it its roots are unimportant, bad, or nonexistent.

I came out of the fog about ten years ago when I first realized when I was born, I did not go to my mother and my brain started connecting the dots about why I’d acted and felt certain ways all my life.

I think I’m finding a new phase, and that is entering the body. I’m sixty years old and I’ve lived a life where I’ve spent much of my energy trying to be in other people’s minds and bodies so I could know if I was safe.

You aren’t given a body when you are adopted. The parents are given a body. You are given parents. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that now, a year and a half after becoming an orphan, I am finding the space and energy to claim myself. It’s a little like being a goldfish all your life and then looking down and realizing you are a giraffe. Much needs to change! Giraffes can’t breathe under water! How have you been doing this? Quick! Get to land! Find other giraffes! See what it feels like to walk on legs! Eat leaves and freak out at the taste! All those years of algae!! YUCK! You loved your goldfish family and friends and life, and yet, here you are, a goddamn giraffe.

Maybe this is how the butterfly feels when it eats its way out of the cocoon and finds it has wings.

Okay. That’s all for now. I took the Kolbe test recently to find my conative style (worth researching) and I’m an 8 on quick start and a 2 on follow through. I LOVE jumping in and getting a move on—the completion, tying an essay together, for example, writing a thoughtful conclusion, feels like brushing my teeth with cement. Why bother.

The great thing is I’m a grown up and this is my blog, and so I can quick start all I want and invite you to make the conclusions.

Have a wonderful day.