Thoughts On Birthing a Book and Upside Down Thoughts on Adoption

I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted almost ten years ago, in the spring of 2025. First we (me and the unborn book) flew from California to to NYC, then we got on a train and a ferry and went to Martha’s Vineyard, then we ferried and trained back to NYC for the final hatching. Then we flew back to California.

Birthing a book can be so much more than just sitting at a computer, typing.

It can also, for the record, be just that. Ass in chair, type type type. Your Book Whisperer can tell you Sit the fuck down, and if you are serious about getting your book out, you’ll put stop mowing the grass and go inside. Your Book Whisperer can also have competition: Fear. Fear might step in and say, Sitting is the new smoking. Keep mowing. The book idea is stupid. Make your lawn look nice because that is what really matters: a manicured lawn.

There’s the whole death-bed consideration thing where you can then stand at your mower as the battle rages on in your head and ask yourself if, when you are dying, you will be glad you mowed your lawn instead of chasing your dream to write your story, or any story.

Carrying the urge to write is not something I would wish on someone. It’s sort of like wishing the urge to poop on someone about to run a marathon: super inconvenient. All three of my four parents wrote at least one book. Is the urge to write genetic? Who knows. But whatever the case, I’ve had this burgeoning egg feeling in me since I was a teenager. It’s not something that, in my case, goes away. Life unfurls, and something in me is always taking notes, needing to create a document that sums up in some way or another what happened.

It was not in the plans for me to drive across country again. When I did it last year, one way I got from Boston to Santa Cruz was the mantra “You never have to do this again.” When Bird starting throwing up in the Iowa motel at one in the morning, I got dressed, cleaned up the room, and put us both in the car. I think we drove sixteen hours that day. Subtract the letters F U N from the word fun and you get the start of what that trip felt like—an empty space between where I had been and where I was going.

Sure, other people could have kept the letters FUN and had a wonderful time, but that wasn’t what I was after. I was after HOME.

A couple of months ago, the whispering started: Martha’s Vineyard, it said. Go back, it said. Your new book can’t be born here. I want to write about what happened this past year, and, despite the hassle this will cause, I have an internal knowing I can’t (don’t want to) do it here. (In the next paragraph, I am going to talk about my thoughts not always being true. For the record, this knowing does not feel like a thought. It feels like body knowing.)

I learned so much while taking Martha Beck’s Wayfinder coach training program my life turned what feels like upside down. I used to believe most of my thoughts—if my thoughts said I was fat, for a boring example, I was fat. If my thoughts said I wasn’t a very nice person, that was also true. If my thoughts told me I’d been unwanted at birth: truth. Now I see that my thoughts come from a radio (my mind) that is undiscerning, like tape that doesn’t give a shit what sticks to it, and so thoughts are…uh…often really, really wrong. For example, I have had the thought I am someone who doesn’t have enough money since I knew what a quarter was. Because I have this thought, I walked around looking for proof that this is true. This means that my subconscious mind told me to spend money, for example, so I wouldn’t have it. My mind was doing the best it can to make sure my external world mirrors the internal world I had created with my (conscious and subconscious) thoughts. The truth is I am covered with money. Right now I’m wearing a shirt and a sweater and some undies and jeans and socks. Money money money money. I changed my belief to I am a person who has enough money and now it’s all I can see: enough. I have enough food in the frig, enough gas in my tank, enough money to pay rent.

I have so much I want to say about being an adopted person and believing the thoughts I had about relinquishment, adoption, and my relationship with the world and my self. I complained about the long drive, but one of the best things about driving across country is the long, meditative road and the way it can clear the etch-a-sketch of your mind and help you to see things from a cleaner place. The drive is a commitment—you have to really want to get somewhere to drive over three thousand miles to arrive. It’s a show of faith: it’s going to be worth it. It’s an exercise in lunacy: You were living in Pleasure Point! What possibly could top that?

Edgartown.