When I was little, my mother used to warn me when I was hyper with happiness, “Calm down or else you’ll be crying soon.” I thought about this because the other day, I was bright with joy.

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My friend called me last night worried because his son is failing history, a class his son could pass, my friend says, with his eyes closed. “I don’t get it,” my friend says. “He has two A’s and three F’s. He says he’s trying, but he’s not."

 I'd come to Montana, to the very same city I'd started writing about adoption a year ago, to meet my birth father's relatives. People a year ago I hadn't even known existed and people now who were living deep in my heart. 

I have two pills left and I am on a plane to Montana for five days. My hands are going cold, and that’s never a good sign. 

I don’t know what to compare writing about adoption as an adoptee to—nothing else stops my heart and breathing in the same way.

It wasn’t until after I had written my own book and after my mother’s best friend had sent me the journals my mother had given her for safekeeping before her death that I saw it wasn’t all our fault that my mother hadn’t written when she was younger. It was in large part her own. 

Laughing for two minutes when you are fully stretched out engages a lot of muscles. If I had been doing this exercise alone at home I would have stopped for a snack and a drink of water, but Lorien had us on a timer

I am writing this because someone today, when he learned I was adopted, said I was lucky I’d been chosen by good people. He said this, mind you, without knowing a single fact about my parents. And it was the last lucky straw.

Growing up, I thought part of existing was living with a stomach that hurt. As with morning sickness, my stomach wouldn’t hurt while I ate. So I ate a lot. 

I grew up with a fear of making a mistake when it came to writing. My father was a lawyer and my mother was a writer. It was okay to eat food that had fallen on the floor, but a dropped comma was something else...

I went home and my nephew took a video of me reading this story out loud and I posted it on YouTube. This was the single most dangerous and radical, in my mind, thing I had ever done. I was breaking the silence.

And then things got wild.