How, as an adoptee, one who lives in a world where words like bastard, orphan, foster home, abandoned are part of the mythology of life, can one garner strength from language rather than buckle under disempowerment? How can one get a sense of strength from a thing—adoption—that has inherently implied to adoptees the world over you were not good enough to keep?

Even if you try to get rid of your bacterial inheritance—extreme bathing, antibiotics—the bacteria you got from your mother will come back.

So here’s everything I know about writing and adoption:

The how of writing about adoption is by starting where you are. Just write what is on your mind. “Where is she? Why did she leave? Who am I? What should I have for dinner?” The why of writing about adoption is so you can honor your own voice and questions. The when is, of course, now.

Rhonda Churchill gave a talk at the Indiana Adoptee conference that made me excited to be alive. She was adopted; I was adopted, most people in the room listening had been adopted, but her talk was more about personal choice and tenacity than fear or abandonment, and I drank in her message: chase your dream.

How do you survive an adoptee conference?

You leave.

(Hahaha. That was for you, Stephanie.)

I didn’t leave, but I did go straight to the bar.

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?