My secret hope was that I could write myself home. I could run the bases and slide into home plate by writing a book. It would have my name on the cover. It would say I am here. I am valuable. I have a voice. 

I have to make some changes. It’s really hard for me to focus or to get anything done, and this isn’t helpful because I need to get my act in gear and find a place to live. I have been living off the kindness of friends ever since I came back from writing You Don’t Look Adopted in New York (where I still was two years ago today), and it’s time I support myself. 

I just don’t know how to do it.

How can you live on the tracks of a life that feels really yours when you were derailed at the start? How can you spread roots when someone tore them out at the beginning and you keep tearing them out because it’s what you know?

My friend Pam asked me how it felt to finish writing my book. Generally I say I finished my book when I left New York, but that isn’t exactly true. I say that because it’s easier than saying I was pretty much finished except that I didn’t have an ending. 

It's not even Christmas, but I’m going to teach you my best move. I learned it in Boston a few years ago at a 4-day workshop for oncology massage led by Tracy Walton, but it has taken me all this time to really get it.

I can think about changing my life for decades. I can think about getting off the couch for hours. I want to learn how to go from static to flight at a moment’s notice, and so I watch the birds. I listen to all the reasons people have for not writing even though they say they want, more than almost anything, to write a book. I listen to the reasons why people don’t leave their marriages, their jobs, their book clubs, and it’s all starting to sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher. 

I’m writing this to tell you that if you are adopted or if you love someone who is adopted, you need to get yourself or your loved one to our retreat Beyond Adoption: You. I saw what happened during and after the first one, and, truly, it was and is magical. 

I am letting you into the secret world of Write or Die here. This is my cave, my favorite place, the place, to be honest, that I usually charge people to enter. But here you go. Here are the first three exercises I do in Write or Die and the reasons why. And here, thanks to Oleg’s courage and generosity and trust, are Oleg’s responses.

I developed an exercise in my Write or Die classes where you imagine you have five minutes left to live and you have the sweetest presence by you—I picture it as an ear—something that can’t talk; something that just listens. It’s that voice, the voice I use to talk to that ear that is the voice of my soul, the voice of my spine, the voice of me. I have nothing left to lose when I use that voice. I am not speaking to win love. I am speaking to leave a handprint on the wall of the cave before I leave this mortal coil.

I listened to Ram Dass talk to Oprah today on her podcast, and so I have also been thinking about acceptance and love.

What if our hearts are peonies? What if life is not about changing or growing so much as about blooming? What if our hearts all bloomed fully when we looked into the eyes of our beloveds, or into the eyes of ourselves?

What then?

Most editors or coaches or fellow writers will basically try to tell you what your own story is--rather than be a partner in helping you figure it out. I had a therapist tell me all her clients know their answers. It's just the therapist's job to pull them out. Anne's not a therapist. She's better. She costs less! She takes more time. And she's a helluva lot more committed. 

My friends thought I was moody. I thought I was moody. And I was, but it was because I was also getting beaten up from the inside by thoughts that had nothing to do with present reality. Old trauma was trying to find its way out, but since no one in my world knew about the effects on the brain when a child is separated from her mother, I had no one to help me create a pathway for these feelings to escape my body