When you are adopted, the world is torn open and it often requires a lot of work, maybe a lifetime, in order to know your name, your place in the world, your voice. When you are adopted and do art, miracles happen. (When you are not adopted and do art, miracles happen. I mean, hello, have you been inside the Sistene Chapel? Or looked at drawings in a second grade classroom?)

People don’t write for so many reasons, even when it is their deepest dream. There is the fear of the blank page, the fear of having nothing to say, the fear they will sound stupid, the fear others will hate them. There is also the fear of pain. It might hurt in unmanageable ways to say things long buried.

And so we stay quiet.

It’s like a quiet death. Not like. Not using your voice is a quiet death.

To get back to Thelma and Louise, I think that is why Ridley Scott and Callie Khouri sent the two women flying to their death, because the idea of women finding such wild freedom is unbearable. We can’t imagine it—even the artist fail. I’m supposed to believe that those two women loved themselves so much they killed themselves? 

It’s called Camp Suck It Up because, as adopted people, that’s what most of us have been asked to do all our lives: lose everything and then pretend like we didn’t: So what that you lost your mother. Your father. Suck it up. You have new parents. Ones that wanted you. The camp is called Camp Suck It Up because it’s funny and because the t-shirts will look cool. It’s called Camp Suck It Up because I’m in charge now and that’s what I named it.

Ten weeks is too long to go without being regularly held. It’s not just about the children who are relinquished. I think of the babies in the I.C.U. and it is not good. They are both being taken care of--attached to tubes, held in plastic boxes--and they are being starved. Skin contact is necessary to our development as human beings.

I was reading Roxane Gay’s book Hunger tonight, I’m nearly finished. I hadn’t cried reading the first half of book about her body, but something snapped in me today and I've been crying since I read the sentence "I know that I am breaking the unspoken rules of what a woman should look like." I’m still crying, even though I had put down the book fifteen minutes ago and had come upstairs because I heard the fireworks and wanted to see the show.

One thing that I’ve noticed in the Write or Die classes that I teach is that people’s voices and passions are right there, and yet the people are so busy trying to be other, trying to run from the story of a life lived, that they miss the glory of their own self, their interests, loves, obsessions.

Part of the problem with the word adoption is the second syllable, the O. It’s like I’m gagging and I still have more word to say. The O is like a big zero, not the best number for someone who already struggles with identity issues.

I still can’t believe when people adopt kids both parents and kids don’t get adoption handbooks. Giving a baby to parents who know nothing about trauma is like giving a baby seal to an elephant.

We can do better.  

My friend had been reading about the Big Bang, and she was excited. “It was just like a seed,” she said, “this little thing, and then one day, for some crazy reason, it exploded into everything we know, the whole universe.” She looked at her tightly fisted hand, and then flung it open into a star. “Boom!”

But nothing prepared me for Laura. She was the first person who, when I held her head as I did Reiki, I felt the bones of her scalp move. But that wasn’t even the most memorable part.

Yesterday I read a tweet by Jessenia Arias @iamadopted where she said, “It’s okay if the only thing you did today was breathe,” and suddenly my day got easier.