I talked to my friend HBL about that, and the next day he called me to say he had found the pictures of his two boys with their birth (first) moms. He said he found a whole box of pictures and that he’d been crying in his garage because he’d never noticed before that in all the pictures of his older son as an infant, his son was either crying or had a face screwed up in pain.

At the conference, I was thinking about how trauma, how adversity, can be like a sword, and how you can spend your life jamming yourself in the guts with that sword or how you can use the sword to hack a path through the forest of loss to a brighter future.

Dr. Seuss would have had a hell of a time writing about adoption. There aren’t enough words. It would have had to be a picture book.

Brainstorm with your kid, your kid’s teacher, your kid’s therapist. See where he struggles and see how you can help make the path from A to B even easier to traverse. Treat your child like a child for a while (and a while may seem like forever to you, but be patient; he’s been through more than you will ever know and needs more care than a child who stayed with the same mother) and chances are good he will turn into an adult.

After writing my head off for a year, I hit a wall. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, I had nothing to say. It was as if someone had taught me to surf and I’d been riding waves day after day after day until one morning I went to the beach to find the ocean gone.

If Whitman is right, we are all adopted. We belong to each other. This goes to the idea that we only think we are separated beings, that really we are just individual expressions of the same thing: love, energy, universal force, God.

Adoption upsets the nervous system and therefor the life of the adoptee, and, in all likelihood, the lives of those close to him or her. So what calms it?

Trying to look just at my thumb, trying to keep single focus, made me realize my brain doesn’t work like this. It felt like I was trying to shove two or three heads through a tight turtleneck (or meat grinder).

I’d given myself almost a full year to swim in the ocean of grief after realizing what being born to one mother and raised by another without a proper good-bye to either had done to my nervous system. I was sick of adoption. I was sick of hearing the same stories over and over. (You want to hear my generalized story of the adoptee in six words? Something is wrong. No one understands.)

Last night in Tulum, I went to a yoga class in what looked like a big tree house that overlooked the ocean.. At one point the teacher said, There is only now. If you are in the future or the past you are missing your appointment with your life.

But how can you engage fully in the world, how can you flourish as a student or a spouse or a writer when you don’t know your own heart? For adoptees this is a particularly poignant question because many actually don’t understand their hearts, who created them, who rocked their hearts to sleep when they were tiny.

I was shocked. It was like trying to get dressed for a party and coming downstairs to your date only to be told you looked perfect just the way you were, rumpled and tear-stained.

You mean being myself is just as easy as showing up? And you will still love me?

What if the same as true of writing? What if writing is just as easy as showing up?