There was a scene in the episode of This is Us that I watched last night where Randall introduced his birth father to his brother. It took my breath away. It was like watching someone do the impossible and force two opposing magnets together. Another way of describing its effect on me is to tell you it was on par with the scene in Aliens when that thing shoots out of Sigourney Weaver. I didn’t know that could happen.

These days when people ask what I do, I point to my body. “This is a full-time job,” I say, and I’m not exaggerating: being myself is one of those 90-hour Silicon Valley specials. But it comes with benefits, and they are excellent.

Maybe I would have cried when talking about my origins made it clear I hadn’t come from royalty, but tears dry. Any psychiatrist will tell you that to do well in life, you need to know yourself. Otherwise you may as well be driving a manual car you thought was an automatic. Not a smooth ride.

Existing can be painful. Ask the Buddha. Existing as an adoptee can be excruciating. Parents who adopt, we need your help. Get stronger. Have faith in our love. We don’t want to leave you. We just want to be ourselves. The person you adopted. The one with dangling roots. 

My friend Paula Fahey wrote to me the other day about adoption. She said, “If I don’t know how to occupy space in my body, how in the world can I possibly occupy any space in the world?” I thought about her question all afternoon.

The greatest problem human beings face is the fact that we are born to die. And so religions are created. Bars are built. Plastic surgeons make millions. As they age, people get more and more aware of their mortality, and life becomes more and more precious. But what if you already faced death as a relinquished infant and both lost and won? What happens then?

All my who am I, why am I here, and what am I supposed to do with my life questions were answered by page 199, and although I still had two chapters to go, I thought I would stop and write about my sense of calm and acceptance and peace and hope before my head exploded and I lost all ability to type.

I’m learning that living with a wound is, amazingly enough, awesome. It means I am often so full of feeling I think I may die, so I am learning to feel more. I am learning to handle more sensation than I could last year, yesterday. Because of my wound, and my acceptance of it, my love of it, I am more alive.

The thing is, when I was a teenager, I don’t know that I could have talked about adoption. I felt so fundamentally, sickeningly awful about myself that talking about feelings would have felt like a death threat.

Adoptees historically are dreamers, for at the same time they are living in the present, they are cycling through thoughts of the life they didn’t live. Get to know these people. Let them talk. Help them to feel. It’s going to be okay. Better than okay. It’s going to be really good. 

It’s a solid move for adoptees to assert their needs after a lifetime of trying to fit in and not make waves. It’s a little scary, but it works.

My friend has a 16-year-old son and the boy is disappearing before the man’s eyes. The boy is struggling with school, with his relationships, with his performance on the track team. It’s hard enough to be a teenager, but to be a teenager who was adopted is really something.