The Day of Hearts
One challenge of writing about adoption is that the closer to the truth of the experience I get, the more alienated I feel from culture’s beliefs, and the crazier and more alien I feel when I imagine sharing these ideas with those who weren’t adopted. In addition, the more at peace I feel with myself and with relinquishment and adoption, the crazier and more alien I fear I’ll be seen by the adoptee community.
What’s the reward for truly being yourself when you can see that yourself, when revealed, will exist on an island, authentic and alone?
For the past two years, I have been perfecting island living. First, I rented a 500-square-foot house that only one person could sneeze in at a time. After that, I rented a house in a place so deserted I was often the only person walking down the main street in the morning. Finally, I rented a place in a town where I had to drive twenty minutes to buy groceries. I could not get it quiet enough around me, partly because I kept moving around. I both desperately wanted isolation and stillness and desperately wanted action and connection with others.
I have the sense that something is shifting or being born inside of me, and it is my job to bear the impatience I feel and to give myself the time something in my so desperately needs.
This is when having a brain can be both a blessing and a curse. Without a brain I would not be able to tie my shoes, not to mention think to tie them or to even see them or know what they are, and with a brain I get to create stories that can potentially ruin my life. Stories such as, There is something wrong with me. I am broken.
In Joe Hudson’s Connection Course, the team had us work one-on-one with a partner for an experiment where one of us would say whatever negative self-talk we had in our heads that was normally directed at ourselves, only we would say it to the other person, using their name. Joe, there is something wrong with you. Joe, you are not lovable or even likable…
Dumping onto someone else the garbage you throw your own way is a powerful reframe. Yikes. I just called this sweet person a shit head. It’s like walking up to a child and punching them in face for no reason.
The word for that is abuse.
When you live alone, you don’t get to point your finger at others quite so easily. There’s nothing like having a partner in the room so you (okay, I) can fling all the stuff I don’t want to feel about myself in their direction. In the Connection Course, we learned to ask ourselves what would we have to feel if we didn’t let ourselves judge. Ouch. It seems that time and time again, the judgements I throw at others are things I could be judging myself for if I were into that kind of thing—personal responsibility and the like.
All of this is to say, my mind does not need to be so concerned about what others will say or feel when I write about adoption. I’m playing a funny kind of judgment game by putting thoughts in your head so I can focus on you instead of on myself.
I’m itching to get off the island. I’m itching to change. I’ve fallen into so many habits as an adopted person—ways of thinking and behaving and speaking. I wonder what kinds of things I have to think and do and say when I’m more in my body and less in my head. I wonder what it would be like to be a 61 year old run by beginner’s mind instead of by a mind that believes it has seen that, done that.
The birds are out this morning. It is going to be in the 40s today. Winter happens here, and it’s surprising and wicked and beautiful and hard. Is it worth the suffering for the first peep of green?
I would say, yes.
