A Year-Long Writing Group for Those Who Were Adopted—On Zoom— Starting October 14
As someone who has spent her life avoiding groups, it’s hilarious to me that these gatherings are now my favorite place to be. When you are adopted, you get used to being around people who don’t necessarily understand a lot of what goes on in your mind and body because of the complexities around relinquishment and adoption. So, oh!--the relief of not having to constantly explain, apologize, or pretend.
I’ve been teaching writing for three decades, but I created these adoptee-specific groups six years ago when I realized there were concrete reasons it had taken me thirty years to finally realize how to tell my story. The classes I took and the graduate degree I got in creative writing hadn’t helped all that much since I didn’t know what my story was, what parts of it I had “permission” to tell, who my audience was, and what my voice was. My confusion over all four of those things were directly related to the confusion I carried inside about what it meant to be a person who’d been adopted. Once I figured out those elements, I was able to write You Don’t Look Adopted in just over three months. I also had someone there every step of the way, encouraging me, telling me my story was important and that I had to keep going even when it got hard, and he was also was a key piece: I did not feel alone as I wrote myself into unchartered territories. I’m not sure I could have done it alone, frankly. It was too, well, lonely, to write and write with no one there to talk to about it, with no one there to tell me to keep going even when I thought the writing was terrible. Often you can’t be the best judge of your own writing, especially when you think it’s bad.
I created these groups, then, to share with others what I had learned. Writing in community means you can make connections, even life-long friendships, and that makes the journey of writing even more rewarding and important than any finished project, in my opinion.
Ultimately, the group isn’t about writing a book or even your story. It can be if that’s what you want, but mostly it’s about using writing as a tool to get you comfortable with using your voice and asserting who you are, finding out and aiming for what you want, and celebrating what you love about life, and your life in particular.
Every meeting, I’ll give you prompts and about 6-8 minutes to write each one: “Write about the color green.” “Write about what you’d graffeti on the walls of your first mother before you were born.” “Write about any memories you have of first grade.” The prompts can be about anything—I try to think of things you might not write on your own. Then we have everyone read what they wrote. We don’t workshop people’s writing, and the group doesn’t comment on each other’s writing because it’s so easy to fall into people-pleasing mode and start writing to get positive comments. The idea isn’t to be good. It’s to be authentic (which, ironically, is as good as good writing can be, in my experience). How easy can it get for you to write what first comes to mind? How free can you let yourself articulate your thoughts and feelings and then share with others, unedited, unmasked? That’s what the groups are about. If you are writing a memoir or a novel, you can use the prompts to serve your needs, and then during the week, you can develop whatever you wrote to use in your project.
I also run a pretty tight ship. When a group of adoptees get together, it’s easy for someone to lose sense of time as they talk about their story, and suddenly time’s up, and only one person has spoken. That won’t happen here. We have to much to do.
Michelangelo said he believed the statues were already in the block of marble. His job was to uncover them. I feel that way about the people in my groups. I don’t know what you are supposed to say or do. I just know how to ask questions and give prompts to help you more clearly know yourself.
Last year I took Martha Beck’s Wayfinder Life Coaching program because I wanted to learn more about how our beliefs create our world. The idea that we aren’t our thoughts felt new to me. More often than not I believed what I thought. I wanted to be able to both tell my stories and not be dragged around by stories my brain told me (she didn’t want you, there’s something wrong with you) that weren’t actually true. I wanted to use writing to find what was real, not to build on limiting beliefs that were keeping me back. Learning more about how my brain works with stories was a life-changer for me, and I have a lot to share about what I learned from Martha, one of the greatest life coaches around.
I chose to make the groups a year long because it seemed like a big commitment. It turns out a year is a good amount of time when it comes to creating safety and attachment. The groups I run often keep going on their own long after we are done, and often they ask to keep going with me. To have a space where you can return to and feel safe and seen and celebrated and challenged is no small thing.
You can choose to meet at 9 AM on Wednesdays or 4 PM PT. If you need to miss a class, maybe you will have time to jump into the earlier or later one. It’s $150 a month, and I take Venmo, Paypal, or Zelle.
By the way, you can do the group even if you hate writing. Ultimately, after all, it’s not even about the writing. It’s about using writing to better see your life. (You can just go to Camp Suck It Up and pretend you like the writing if that makes it more tolerable.) I work really hard to create a safe, creative, fun space where you can know you will be both loved and pushed out of your comfort zone by me because I care, because I love authenticity and courage and commitment to goals more than just about anything. I helped the winningest coach in Ivy League history write her book because, in part, I wanted to learn about coaching people to excellence. Winning is, after all, really fun.
If you have any questions, please email me at anneheffron@gmail.com.
