I believe for many adoptees this lifetime journey is to find a true sense of self. Adoptees who are relinquished at birth have a quick first life that ends when the separation between mother and child occurs. Adoptees who were relinquished later have longer first lives: a week, a year, four years, ten years, seventeen years.

I’ve been thinking a lot about communication recently. There is a certain stillness some people have when they listen. My daughter has it. My friend Karen has it. Katie has it. HBL has it. The space between us gets magnetic, and I have the sense they aren’t thinking about the night before or what to say when I am done talking. I get the feeling they are listening. And that is almost better than food.

When people tell you that everything will be alright or that you are silly for having certain feelings or that it could be worse, your reaction can be to turtle, to go back into your shell, and then the world loses the opportunity to learn and love. 

It takes a lot of focus to chase your dreams. I find my brain is so comfortable in telling me things that keep me inside. My brain loves to tell me how easily everything could fall apart. My brain loves to terrify me, but I’m waging a counterattack. This next year it’s going to be me against that big scoop of oatmeal that occupies my skull. This year I’m going to show it who’s boss.

I had dinner with some friends of friends one of the nights I was here, and after a couple of drinks, the man said to me, “You have to let go of your past.” I knew what he was talking about. It’s adoption, adoption, adoption with me. And that’s fine, but I also don’t want to be an adopted child anymore. I want to be Anne. I told him that if I knew how to let it go, I would. But all I knew was how to be the way I was used to being.

Today I was out hiking, and I realized I was doing something I’d been doing ever since I could remember: trying to find focus.

I turned off episode 15 of This is Us near the start when Randall reassures his daughter who is anxious about her grandmother’s health. “Everything is going to be fine,” Randall says, and his face looks like he is about to crack. Your job as an adoptee is to tell the world and yourself you are fine, while inside, the pressure of all you have lost and all you have been unable to say builds up inside of you.

I don’t want to have a conversation with you and feel that we’re skating. I want to swim and go deep, touch the bottom if I can. If I wanted to stay on the surface, I could sit at home and watch TV, but instead I’m investing my attention in you, and I want real.

Something magical happened this last time I did EMDR with Lesli Johnson. I walked away from my mother with a light heart. Granted, my mother is dead and so the scene happened only in my imagination, but it felt real, and I am not the same person who went into the session. I am more myself. I feel free. Like a kid who is going out to play.

This will seem like it’s coming out of nowhere, but here’s my point: I hate it when people call my parents my “adoptive” parents. Yes. That is what they are. But why can’t I have “parents” like almost everyone else I know does? Why do my parents have to have an adjective?

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.