This is my second summer in New England since moving away to go to college, and last week, feeling ready, I had taken on poison ivy.

So as not to ruin the experience, I had to keep reminding myself not to make stories out of my body’s feelings.

My friend and fellow adoptee and writer, Andrew, texted and sent me a Father’s Day episode of the podcast Honestly by Bari Weiss. “These motherfuckers are fucking lying,” Andrew wrote. “Start listening at minute 33.”

Live like a narcissist.

I truly feel as if I’m wringing myself—my self—out as I write about what it’s like to finally start trusting and feeling at home in my body.

Sometimes I think being adopted is like wearing a condom all the time. You get to feel, but not completely, and both your vital energy and the ability to connect with the vital energy of others is blocked.

Like a good adult, I’ve been practicing being a better listener for a long time, with highly mixed results.

What do you do when there’s no one to tell what happened, no one to help you process? How to you absorb the shock of not being seen?

These paintings are my way of processing all of these complex emotions and facts.

I had this idea to ask a group of adopted people to write the screenplay of their life in 30 minutes. So many of us get overwhelmed by our stories—by past traumas in particular—and getting it “all” down on paper in 30 minutes can feel like trying to put a giraffe in an empty aspirin bottle, but once you do it, you feel like you can do anything. You are the master of your own story.

I had the feeling that adopted people who have chosen not to bring children into the world might have a lot to say, so I got some of them together to listen.

I got to 19 minutes and fifty-one seconds in the April 28, 2023 episode of Adoptees On, and I had to take a breather.