Want to Be Part of a Group Essay for People Who Were Adopted? WHAT I REALLY WANT TO SAY IS…

I was thinking more about how it can be challenging when you are someone who was adopted to know what you are feeling. Not what your coping mechanism self is feeling, but your Self self. The part of you that directs you away from what doesn’t serve you and towards a truer calling that is in alignment with your body’s energy, the energy that was created inside of Planet Mother. The energy that, if not seen and mirrored, can get quiet, hidden, misaligned, ill, and crazy.

I find anger is a wonderful tool when it comes to excavating your current state in search of one that feels more in alignment with your soul. In my writing groups, time and time again when I ask people to write from anger, what ends up happening when they read their work out loud is that the Zoom space does not feel full of anger. It more often than not feels full of truth clearly expressed. I’m not saying one can’t express truth clearly with anger. I’m saying that the tone is often not angry. It’s more much matter of fact. And this, the truth spoken plainly can feel like anger to someone who is used to masking.

This means that making simple requests can feel dangerous because they can feel as if they are coming from a place of anger.

This means it can feel easier to stay quiet than to risk upsetting people.

This is, of course, a bullshit crappy way to live. Survival mechanisms can lead to people driving their own lives right off the road all with the best of intentions. Stay alive. Don’t make others mad. Crash into a tree. Hurt someone or yourself. Fuck up your car and the tree.

I love asking my groups to write for six minutes from a place of anger in all capital letters: WHAT I REALLY WANT TO TELL YOU IS…

Write until you run out of juice or time. If you finish one thought and there’s still some time left, start again. WHAT I REALLY WANT TO TELL YOU IS…

Get something off your chest. Say something you are afraid to say. Have an opinion. Sit in your rage and let it speak, not worrying about whether you make sense of whether you are using punctuation correctly. Rage doesn’t care about commas. Rage cares about freedom. LET ME OUT. I HAVE SOMETHING I WANT TO SAY OR DO.

I invite you to do this exercise and send me your work. You can sign your name, use your initials, or be anonymous. I’d love to create a blog post of those who answer so we could have a wall of feelings all by people who were adopted.

You can’t do it wrong. You can’t sound stupid. You can try, but I’ve yet to have someone do something wrong or sound stupid in one of my groups, and I’ve worked with hundreds and hundreds of people. The sound of an adopted person telling the truth is one of my favorite sounds in the world. It’s music. It’s awe inspiring. It’s food.

Have fun. You don’t know what you have to say half the time until you let yourself say it. Thoughts tend to circle in the head. The page gives them a longer runway so they can really pick up steam and be fully expressed.

I have come to suspect that for many adopted people (well, for me), it’s easy to confuse the feeling of being alive in Self energy as anger or rage. This means that being yourself can feel like you are on fire, only not in a cool, watch me go kind of way but in an oh no, I could destroy things kind of way.

You know, like being alive.

What if, when we were born, the feeling of being alive felt like TOO MUCH? What if we learned to tighten, hold onto nothing, refuse as much as possible the life that was streaming through us screaming WHERE IS SHE? What if a safe life then began to feel either like this, like TOO MUCH, something we would need things such as anxiety and caffeine and fear later in life to put us back into that agitated state, or maybe a safe life felt like a numbed one, one dialed down to an I’M NOT REALLY HERE place?

So much is waiting to be expressed and heard.

I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.