Sitting Naked in 6th Grade Listening to Music

My friend Jill is hilarious.

Today she sent me a meme that said I want to be 25 again and ruin my life differently. I have new ideas.

I know Jill because she’s also adopted and that’s how we met, in being adopted land.

So, naturally, her meme made me think of being adopted and being 25 again and having new ideas.

Then my brain took the idea and gleefully sprinted down the road with it. I ran as fast as I could to keep up, taking notes. I don’t want to ruin my life. I want to live it.

My brain saw me and the other adopted people who have new ideas as twelve year olds (there were too many new ideas—I needed to go back to when I was a kid—my brain needed me to be still in elementary school, but barely). We were walking to school when suddenly the knowing of adoption and how we would feel about it when we were 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and on filled our minds, and with this knowing, we tore off our clothes as we walked, leaving a trail of what was behind us.

They were not the right clothes. We had not chosen them. Our coping mechanism self had put them on, the parents of our coping mechanism self had bought them for us. The clothes were not right. Most of us had no idea what right looked like or felt like, but we knew it was not these clothes, and so we walked the rest of the way to school naked. We did not care .0000000001% what others thought. We were on a mission. We were so on a mission, people did not even notice our nakedness. They did notice we had a lot of purpose in our step, and they admired our energy. Some even tried to imitate our walk; some went home later that day and tore off their clothes in their bedroom and looked at themselves admiringly in the mirror, but that’s their story.

We, the naked kids who had been adopted, sat in the back row of sixth grades all over the world and put on headphones and listened to music. First things first. We had to find the soundtrack for our lives before we could listen to any teacher fill our heads with what’s what about the world.

Music lets you feel how your heart operates and gets you to look up and find your North Star.

When you are an infant, this music is your mother’s heartbeat, the sound of her body, the sound of her voice. Then the world around you enters, and that also becomes part of your soundtrack.

Sitting naked in sixth grade listening for your soundtrack, listening for the songs that make your heart and brain and the universe align is the first step in figuring out what makes you you. Well, taking off your clothes was the first step. We come into the world naked, am I not right?

And then we start to figure out what makes us want to get up and dance.

ps I know that in many places 6th grade is not elementary school. But it was for me, so I just went with that. Okay?