Change, Square One, and Adoption

I left Massachusetts for California on August 15, 2024, with the dream that I was going to finally create a home for myself when I got there. Like a baseball player in that had been stuck in a permanent loop of running the bases without the satisfying stick of sliding into home plate, I was finally going to nail it.

Ours is a big country. Getting from A (Massachusetts) to B (California) could be a wonderful road trip or it could be a fucking pain in the ass. I chose the second option since who wants to enjoy life and to slow down and enjoy the scenery when you can drive like a maniac and eat only food you can buy at a gas station because you don’t even care what you put in your body as long as it either has caffeine or sugar in it to keep you going? I made it the three-thousand-six-hundred-and-something mile drive in four and a half days. A new personal record.

In Martha Beck’s Wayfinder Life Coach training program, we were taught the change cycle as Martha imagines it. Martha believes we go into square one after a triggering event: a death of a parent, a loss of a job, moving to a new town—anything that invites some sort of reimagination/recreation of self. Square One is the caterpillar going into a cocoon and dissolving. Square One is soup.

Square Two is when the caterpillar is taking shape inside the cocoon. This is a time of dreaming and scheming. You don’t do anything, but you think about what you could do, what you want to do, when the time comes for you to chew your way out of the cocoon and fly. I love Square Two. Square Two makes me think of when I was younger and would meet a friend at a bar, and we’d have a drink and dream and dream and imagine all the great things that we could do next. Square Two is where anything is possible. I’ll talk about Square Three and Square Four in another post.

What I had thought was going to happen was that I was going to arrive in California and finally be done with the grieving of my dad’s death and the feeling of having no idea who I was without my parents, I imagined I would move on to Square Two where I’d have a blast dreaming up the life I wanted to create as I settled into my new neighborhood, Pleasure Point.

This is not what happened. Instead, I sat in my adorable little house and felt like a bell without a clapper. For seasons! Thank god I had learned about Square One because otherwise I would have thought I was dying instead of being recreated. Well, I did still think I was dying because being recreated, being soup, being a bell that makes no sound, is a form of death.  I didn’t want to do much of anything, is what happened, aside from a handful of my favorite things: walking Bird in lovely settings (the redwoods, the beach, the eucalyptus grove), leading my online groups, attending the Wayfinder classes, practicing coaching, and resting on my delightfully soft bed.

I grieved my old self, the one who had been driven to do more—the one who had gotten in her car instead of sitting down to rest just for the sake of staying in motion, of chasing the new, of dreaming how life could be different.

Who was I without the dreams of how I could be different, better, someone else?

Square One was bringing me face to face with that answer, and it was hard for my brain to process: I would be who I was.

When you are born and your mother gives you away, at least in my case, it’s very hard to believe it’s okay to be you. Even decades and decades later. When you are adopted and when your new parents take you as their own, it’s hard to believe it’s okay to be you because these new parents aren’t seeing you, they are seeing the you that belongs now to them. They are seeing a you that has their family lore in your genes, their blood, their ancestral stories. They are seeing a Not-You.

When my parents died, that Not-Me died along with them. What’s a girl to do after that but to turn to soup?

There is a me in there that was not seen in its completeness when I was relinquished and adopted, and so it could not exist, but it has been waiting all these years to be seen by somebody before it gave up and started morphing into cancer cells or chronic fatigue or something else heartbroken and half dead. It turns out that somebody, in my case, is me.

If I believe I am possible, I can happen.