I’m Not On MDMA But It Sure Feels Like I Am — An Adoptee on Experiencing Dysregulation in Slow Motion

I have the feeling the sessions I did the past two years on MDMA taught my brain how to sometimes slow time and to stay with the tangle of a problem, watching it unwind instead of jumping into reaction and tightening it.

Right now my brain is slowly showing me what it feels like when I want to pack up and go. Instead of doing what I almost always do, I’m sitting through the feeling, and I’m staying. 

This may sound cool and maybe, I don’t know, easy? (I don’t have to pack! I don’t have to drive 3,200 miles! I can just sit on my ass and have feelings!), but what if you had sex in slow motion? At some point, wouldn’t you probably start yelling to go faster? I mean, slow can feel amazing until it starts feeling like you hate it and want to rip your hair out.

That’s how staying with the tangle of a problem can feel—like I want to crawl out of my skin to escape sensations I can’t even name. Well, it’s not that I can’t name them: buzzing hands, floaty head, spaciousness in my guts, skin cool, it’s that the feelings themselves don’t at all explain or illustrate why I’m so fucking upset. 

I told a friend today that I thought my body was an electrical wire that got cut when I was separated from my mother at birth and that now, for some reason, 61 years later, all I can feel is myself as this cut wire. 

I want to write that I am beside myself, but a more accurate statement would be I am in myself. I am like a person in a river, my self is flooded and I wonder how I will survive this rush I cannot escape because it is so much bigger and stronger than I am.

I remember this feeling. This is when, as a kid, I would cause some sort of trouble and end up crying. I feel amped, like I’ve had too much sugar and/or not enough sleep. I’m teetering on the edge of out of control, like a glass that’s moments away from hitting the ground. I’m also like a rush of electricity without boundaries. I’m a drowning being, an almost-broken glass, lightning without edges. I am fucked up is what it feels like, and the need to fuck up something in my world so I can try to get a grip and slow the spin down is deafening.

 In my need to act out, I’m not safe with myself. Others aren’t safe with me.

Not acting out feels like I’m one moment away from becoming real. I don’t know how else to say it. Maybe this is how a flower feels the second before its petals unfurl. Maybe this is how a fetus feels when consciousness first enters its being. Oy. Whoa. I’m here.What’s all this?

I think this feeling is what I’ve spent my life working around. It’s like I’m married to a raging alcoholic, only I’m the sober one and the drunk one all at once. I’m my own codependent couple. 

I think about all those therapists I went to when I was younger. Not one talked with me about my relinquishment and adoption. It wasn’t until I was in my 50s and had written You Don’t Look Adopted and spoke with Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao that I realized how much money I’d wasted on therapists who had no idea who was sitting on their couch.

 I want that money back, all y’all—I don’t even remember your names. You can send it to Dr. Joyce. Tell her I’m grateful for her work. She accepts Venmo.