I am here to tell you there is nothing wrong with you. That if you feel shame about something, in my eyes, that means you have a story to tell. And story is opportunity, opportunity for connection, for art, for beauty. For redemption. Rebirth. Mayhem. Peace.

I’ve come to understand that I could go crazy trying to heal from adoption. The more I listen to the stories my head tells me: your mother left you; there must be something wrong with you; maybe you can get her back if you are a good girl; you will never get what you want in life because this life isn’t even really yours, the more lost and more hurt I feel.

So this is what I have started to do: I think about where I put my marbles.

No one (that I know of) is grading or ranking your turds. Why does writing get such intense evaluation? Both are forms of creation. Neither makes you special: they are just byproducts of who you are in the world. Proof that you exist.

Once in a massage class, we were given small cups of water, and we were asked to slowly lower one finger to the surface of the water, slowly, more slowly, even more slowly. What we saw was that before we touched the water, the water reached up to touch our finger.

I am going to meet my birth father in a few weeks. In adoptee language, this is a reunion. How many of you out there have had a reunion with a person you have never met?

People could have left me alone when I felt busted. I could have written my book, had my breakdown, ended up by the edge of some river screaming obscenities. I know plenty of cuss words. Just ask Haley Radke. If it weren’t for the kindnesses of others, I might not be lying on this couch, typing as I hear the thrill of hummingbirds at the feeder. I might not have food in the refrigerator. I might be really, really skinny, my backbone visible through through the skin of my belly.

A black child can not see himself reflected wholly in a white family, just as a black actor in a room full of white actors can not see himself wholly reflected. But we as a nation are trying, and This is Us is such an important step in the right direction. We can’t deal with painful situations if we turn a blind eye to them. We have to see problems in order to change them.

My favorite part of the series of Trauma Release Exercises is the last part, where you lie on the floor in butterfly pose and let your legs shake. They shake because the psoas, that beautiful, holy muscle, is releasing.

Do you know what it is like to communicate with someone who has an open heart? It’s like swimming in the ocean on a calm day, when you feel both buoyed and alive. It’s like realizing the space between words on the page have a sound, the spaces between paragraphs have a life of their own. When someone talks to you with their heart open and listens to you in the same way, there is peace. There is hope. There is prana.

I feel good about this idea. It basically made the heat wave worth it. After my plan is put into action, everything will be so different! I won’t see images of starving children. I won’t hear about single mothers struggling financially. Every night I will fall asleep thinking that all over the world children get to fall asleep the way I do, in a soft bed, with a full stomach, with a morning on the horizon where anything is possible because someone cared enough to give them support.

One thing about teaching writing is that I often spend time getting people to slow down when they read their work out loud. They went to all this trouble to put words on a page and then they read as if the paper is on fire.

I discovered something a few weeks ago. I learned how to be bigger in order to contain the joy that increasingly was filling me, waves and waves of ocean light filling the skin of me. I wanted to be able to feel joy as well as I could contain fear and sadness. It’s interesting how painful it is to feel so good. It was like stretching a tight muscle: the alarming burn that was either terrible or wonderful, the sweet deep sting of you are alive.