When people find their voice on paper, it’s as if they were living at last in their eyes. In a New York Times article, Erin Meyer wrote about discovering during a business trip to Japan the way to read whether someone in a group wanted to speak was not if they raised their hands; it was to look in their eyes. The people with bright eyes had something they wanted to contribute. 

Sometimes the men liked to remind me there was a time two things weren’t allowed on boats: women and bananas. 

You can imagine what I often packed in my lunch bag.

When I was in the office with Kate, talking about circling the drain, Kate said, “But drains go somewhere,” and suddenly I saw it: I could slip right down the drain and the long release of slide could be fun! What if the drain went straight to Paris, and suddenly, in the gutters of that magical city, out I popped?! 

For the longest time, until less than a year ago, I regularly bought journals and notebooks and then put them up on my bookcase, blank. Or if I did write in them, I would tear out the pages. I was so afraid of being exposed. The problem was the thing I was hiding was me. I’d been doing it for so long I didn’t know. I thought I was private.

Instead of asking of the adoptee, What is wrong with you? a better question might be What is wrong? And because an adoptee probably isn’t even aware what is wrong, just that something is, an even better question might be along the lines of, I wonder what it was like for you when you were born?

I’m going to tell you about something here I have not written about for the same reason I keep something precious in my pocket—so I don’t lose it.

But it happened. It was real, and it was like winning the lottery. Only better because strangers weren’t calling for loans and my taxes weren’t affected. 

Baudelaire called out to the glazier, Make life beautiful! That’s the song I want to pace my days by, my sentences. My heart.

I resisted the show This is Us because so many people told me I should watch it. Should is like an alarm—it’s so easy to should all over your life—and I’m trying not to do that anymore. 

My writing partner is very persistent, and one night she wouldn’t take “Maybe later,” as a response. She got me to the couch and turned on the television. “It’s just so real,” she kept saying. “So true. So good.”

A couple of months ago I wrote to 23 and Me to tell them my story because, I thought, it was a good one. I heard back from them the next day. It was a good story, I’d thought, but I hadn’t dreamed it was next-day good.

I packed up all my stuff in California and gave up my apartment. I quit my job. I told everyone I knew I was leaving to write a book and that I wasn’t coming back until I was finished. I called the trip Write or Die. I was terrified. I honestly thought I might die. I was also alive.  I was finally going to see what I was made of.

I didn’t die. I only threw up once, and when I was done, I got up off the bathroom floor and went back to work. 

It was the best 93 days of my life. Write or Die taught me to listen to myself. It taught me how to write. It also taught me how to live. 

My daughter is in college now, and I don’t get to see her that often, but last night, Christmas Eve, she slept over, and for a little while, before turning over to fall asleep, we lay with our eyes closed and held hands. 

Being adopted made me feel special, unknowable. Like a had a secret room that no one else I knew had, except for my brothers. They also had no idea who their birth parents were or where they had been for the early part of their life. We were normal kids with secret compartments.

Except maybe we weren’t that normal.