When I was younger, there was a story on the news about birth parents reclaiming a child they had given up for adoption. My mother ran from the room. “I would die if anyone took you from me,” she said. I heard her. I heard that I was valued, needed, loved. I heard I was something she felt she needed to hold on to, that someone out in the world might want to take me away from her. That I needed to prove my love by staying. 

Most of my life I have felt as if I am either running to catch up to something (me) or running to escape something (me). Yesterday I walked for three hours because I was trying to do both. I’d stared reading The Spirit of Open Adoption by James Gritter, and I was feeling too much; I was feeling like an exploding spider, too much leg and not enough escape.

The other night, I watched the mid-season finale of This Is Us, and, as it is here, it was Christmas time. As the show drew to its conclusion, Randall’s house filled with family and friends. His birth father was there. And his mother who had adopted Randall at birth. I get chills even as I write this. 

I might as well have thought, I think I’ll take off all my clothes and run downtown. Running naked in pubic rarely goes well. But there I was, high on the floor with my computer on my belly, dreamily typing, sometimes with tears running down the sides of my face, about me and money. More accurately, about me and debt.

As painful as it was to see Randall’s face when he hugged his father, as painful as it was to remember sometimes feeling a hug from my parents was not enough and that I was therefore not okay, I feel more alive today for having sat in witness to another adoptee’s pain (yes, it was a TV show; yes it was an actor, but I’ll take what I can get when it is this good) and, as a result, to my own.

I read more books before Facebook came into my life. It was easier to focus on the page when there wasn’t the promise of dopamine hits every time I looked at my phone. And while reading novels connected me to the world in a way that felt vitally important to me, Facebook connects me to a world that talks back.

What do you do for a high school kid who can’t focus but hasn’t yet come out of the adoption fog of not knowing being adopted has deeply affected his ways of being in the world? How do you help someone who can’t do his homework do it? Teenagers are scary in their shut downs, their dark looks. But they need help.

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.