Let’s give adopted kids the boost they need to succeed in school. Let’s help them see they are safe. Let's get them help before they ask. Let's get them help before you think they need it. If you don’t know of any adoption-competent therapists, ask me. I’ll find you one.

Watching This is Us is like a full body workout as it goes for and clears trigger point after trigger point that I didn’t even know was there. Issues about my mother, my daughter, my job, my friends, my eating, my feelings are reflected back to me week after week, and I am more alive in my body because of this.

Our lives are experiments. If we are to be defined by what we set to paper without the opportunity for revision and new understanding or growth, then writing is like carving words into a tombstone.

My friend thinks of ways to get the boy excited about opportunity. If the boy studies, he can get into college. If he gets into college, he can be whatever he wants to be. You know. That kind of talk. The talk we give. The talk we heard.

I realized something about myself in this past year of coming out of the fog, or, as Lesli Johnson recently said on the podcast Adoptees On, coming into the truth. I realized that if I can choose between two places to stick my face, a warm box of empty air or a heart-pounding bath of acid, more often than not, I’d pick the acid.

I have been putting off writing this post because I can’t possibly do the topic justice. I feel like I’m going to try to describe a beautiful baby to you by just showing you the arm.

But what the hell. Here goes.

I was not the only one to fall in love with Brooke. My boyfriend at the time, also a bodyworker, was the one who had introduced me to the show, and he was also the one who said something along the lines of “I wish she were my girlfriend.”

Yesterday as I went about being 100% myself (that means I behave in ways that feel true to me), I was scolded four times. Four. I can’t remember if there was ever a day in my life where I was scolded more than twice.

I love hugs. I was a serial dater for a while mostly for the hugs. This isn’t always the best trade, the promise of relationship for the rush of oxytocin I got from extended hugs. Oxytocin, the chemical that tells me Everything is okay; you are merging with another human; you are not alone; you are loved.

Having a room for dreams attached to your head is a wonderful thing unless, say, you are a high school student who is being asked to be present and to be focused. Or unless, say, someone is asking you to submit a business proposal and you aren’t even really there. Having a room for dreams means I have one foot in my life and one foot somewhere else, anywhere else.

I read the other day scientists have recorded the sound of mice singing. It turns out that those little guys sing to each other as the scurry about the walls of our houses. What else is singing that I do not hear? I am hoping that my five-year-old ears will hear more, will hear the songs, will know that this whole time, my whole life, the world has been singing to me, my house has been singing to me, to me and to Laura Foote and to you, and I just didn’t hear it. 

I have learned something that helps me teach writing. People tend to circle around the real story, the trigger point of what makes them compelled to write. I can tell when they are circling when they talk and the stories just spill out, stories these people clearly have been telling for years, if not for most of their lives. The stories are on greased tracks and they are not the thing. The thing is something else.