And this is why I haven’t gone back to watch more of This is Us. I want a happy ending for Randall. I want him to be free in his skin. I just don’t know how the show’s writers, who keep nailing what it means to be adopted, can stay true to experience and still keep the viewers on the couch. At what point do we decide Randall has suffered too much and turn off the TV so we can eat pizza and forget?

It’s not about the ending, I found: it’s about the telling. You just need to be able to tell your story. And then everything comes to life.

It wasn’t until last year when I started reading and writing about adoption that I realized my inability to attach and my delayed style of blooming probably had to do with being adopted. I’m not a boy, so I don’t know the full physical impact of being kicked in the nuts, but I imagine being relinquished is physically and psychically like a serious kick in the balls.

The other night I realized how radically I had changed when I was sitting in the living room of a friend’s house, and I thought: I could live in a place like this. I could live here in peace and not have to move to get away from myself. By telling my story, I had calmed my Mantosh. I realized I carried peace in my head. I sat very quietly on the couch and looked around as if the world were so fragile it might break if I blinked.

My friend told me that she’d sent my book to her sister, and that her sister had called her after reading it and had said to my friend, “I love you and I will never leave you.” My friend teared up when she told me this story. “I’m not adopted,” she said. “But clearly that was something I needed to hear.”

Writing about adoption is like stealing. It’s like overeating. It’s like lying. It’s like slapping the person you love most across the face. It’s like singing. It’s like praying. It’s like breathing. It’s like hauling rocks. It’s like flying. It’s like giving birth. It’s like throwing up. It’s like carving a gravestone. It’s like standing on a tightrope. It’s like beating someone’s knuckles with a ruler. It’s like skating. It’s like spinning a web. It’s like drowning. It’s like being born.

Her mother had said that, although she’d heard of Ellen Gilchrist, she didn’t know where she was or where she lived but that her friend across the street might know her and that we could go over and ask. We couldn’t call this friend because she didn’t have a phone, but we could just drive over and look for her.

And that, I believe, is where storytelling comes in, a way for us to create our own healthy sense of self with language that we chose. So many of us grew up with others telling us our stories of origins, but now we are big enough to tell our own stories.

I have a friend who suffers from depression. She’s one of the funniest people I know. Once when we were out walking, she told me she’d decided she was going to say, “This is the best day of my life!” every time someone asked her how she was. We laughed our heads off as we practiced on each other. “This is the best day of my life!” we kept saying, and it made us laugh and laugh. Who cares if we were miserable? It was the best day ever!

1.     Be born.

2.     Realize you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.

3.     Settle for the bottle given to you by someone who doesn’t sound, smell, or feel familiar.

4.     Want something else but have no words express desire.

5.     Have above feeling for the rest of your life and eat twice as much as you need in the effort of eating yourself around the corner of loss to home.

It’s funny how actively I had to corral myself(s) to write these two scenarios. It’s easy to remember how the events hurt—what was hard was letting myself gain control in the situations and letting myself write what I wish had happened.

In both cases, I felt euphoric afterwards. (Note to self.)

I’d seen pictures of Joyce, but she was not her pictures. She’s more…real. Her hair is a red I wanted to touch, her face even sweeter, even prettier than in the pictures I’d seen online.