Tired from my second red-eye in three nights and from months of accumulated stress, I arrived in Zanzibar yesterday morning. As the passengers around me unclipped their seatbelts, stretched their legs and unsealed overhead compartments, I thought about the big red backpack I would need to hoist down and onto my shoulders before I could walk off the plane and into the green heat.
I’d brought the backpack, rather than checking a roller-bag, because I wanted to prove to myself I could figure out how to get myself across the island using dala-dalas, the (very cheap, very crowded) Tanzanian form of public transport, instead of taking a taxi, which would cost about the same as a cab ride across London and which would be seamless and simple. I do this sometimes—set myself inconvenient challenges to prove my self-sufficiency.
This summer, life felt easy and smooth, and with deep sincerity, I told my therapist I was worried I was getting soft, that I was losing my edge, and that this scared me. I used to have this thing where I tried not to cry in therapy, because I didn’t want to waste precious minutes that could be spent spilling out a bucket-full of loose memory-beads and trying to find a pattern in which to string them together before the clock ran out, but when my therapist asked why I needed to have an edge, my voice broke. Sniffling and blinking and looking at the ceiling, I tried to explain that I’d become convinced, very early on, that if I could be chosen, I could be unchosen, so I needed to be prepared for the people and structures around me to disappear or crumble. “When my world blows up, as it tends to do, I need to be ready for it—I can’t run or fight or do whatever it is I need to do if I’m lounging around, believing in some fairytale life where no one leaves and everything goes smoothly. I’m not a comfort-zone person,” I said. She asked if I really wasn’t a comfort-zone person, or if I just didn’t know what a comfort-zone felt like. She challenged me to try to lean into comfort, to try to work through the discomfort I felt about making myself vulnerable in this way.
I tried to focus on the joy I got from taking care of 46 plants on my balcony, becoming a weekend-regular at a vegan restaurant nearby and being good at my job, but I still felt anxious about not feeling anxious enough. At the end of the summer, to make sure I still had it, I took myself, by myself, on a four-and-a-half-day, 96.8-mile hike through western Scotland, carrying everything I needed in this same red backpack. I pressed through knee pain and climbed something called “The Devil’s Staircase” alone in the dark, and by the end, I felt reassured that I was indeed strong, and this made me feel safe.
A few days after crossing the finish line in Scotland, I rolled into my first adoptive mom’s driveway in Louisiana. I texted her to let her know I had arrived, and when she didn’t respond for several minutes, I called. The phone rang and rang, so I hung up, took some deep breaths and walked towards the front door. I didn’t ring the bell because I was afraid of her dog, a Rottweiler who had lunged and snapped at me the last time I’d visited, transporting me into the mind of my four-year-old self, who had been knocked over and chased by a big dog and was afraid anything that barked would tackle me and tear off my face. I peered through the glass beside the door, trying to be noticed while also trying not to be.
My mom jumped up from her chair when she saw me, and the dog barked. I took another deep breath while she latched her finger under the dog’s collar and guided her towards the back door, into the yard. Last year when I visited, she told me her memory was starting to feel “thin,” and I dismissed her, as much to comfort myself as her—reminding her she’d always been a little spacey and telling her not to worry. When she came back to greet me, I felt a new weight to our embrace, but I didn’t realize how much had changed in the year since I’d seen her, how much more of her I had already lost.
Three days ago, on the first morning of my seven-week writing trip, I sat down for breakfast in Doha with one of my brothers. I have two older brothers, whom I have known my whole life, and we share the same biological parents, but I was adopted and they were not. I’ve read a lot of adoption stories, seeking parallels, seeking solidarity, but they never quite tick all the boxes, and I usually end up feeling more isolated. Most adoptees who write about their experiences focus on the empty space at the beginning of their lives. The Blank First Chapter. Because my adoption was open, I haven’t struggled to supplement a dearth of information; rather, my challenge has been parsing through the abundance of (often conflicting) information and the cacophony of voices which have chimed in to tell me who I am.
Near the end of breakfast, after I’d explained why I no longer identified as Christian and rattled on about how I had been giving my job everything I had, but was struggling with feeling a lack of purpose at work, my brother set his hands on the table. “Alright, I’m going to get really deep with you.” He asked if I felt any anger towards my birth father over my adoption. Whether I was resentful that I’d been given away, when my brothers had been kept. My instant response was the same it’s always been—I said I’ve never wished I wasn’t adopted; it was my adoptive parents’ divorce and what felt like abandonment by my first adoptive mother when I was two that I believed was my deepest wound and what I thought was the source of my anxious attachment style. There were things that I was sensitive about, like people referring to rehoming shelter animals interchangeably as “rescuing” or “adopting,” or having to take a few seconds to decide how to answer when someone asked me a simple biographical question like whether I had siblings, but overall, I didn’t think being adopted was one of the things that messed with my head. He sat back in his chair and the conversation drifted.
My flight from Doha to Zanzibar took off at 2:20am, and after spending hours wandering the duty free shops with my growing pack strapped to my back, I thought I would fall asleep immediately. Instead, I found myself flipping through the new releases and hovering over one featuring Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore. The tagline described a fraught relationship between one beautiful white woman who ran an orphanage in India and another who ran a company in New York. It seemed like it might be white-savior-y, but I watched the trailer anyway, and I stayed up for two of the six hours of the flight watching the film. (Spoiler alert—it’s about adoption.) Because my open adoption doesn’t fit the narratives we usually hear about adopted children, I’ve spent most of my life thinking my brain was wired differently to both the non-adopted people in my world and other adoptees, and feeling isolated from both, but even though the story on the screen was drastically different to mine, I felt my heart jumping and aching at certain parallel points. I also felt annoyed at and disappointed by certain stereotypes, like the birth mother everyone seemed to think it was alright to criticize for choosing to leave a child she couldn’t take care of at 18.
Once I made it through customs and immigration, I didn’t have the mental or physical energy for the dala-dala challenge, so I hitched myself to the first taxi driver to approach me in the arrivals hall. He drove quickly, and soon I was on the beach, taking intermittent naps and journaling about my conversation with my brother, my thoughts on the film and my questions about how being adopted actually had affected me.
My plan for today was to take a kite-surfing lesson, have a FaceTime therapy session and read something else, but a sudden downpour prompted me to check the weather and I saw the storms were going to continue until evening. Because my brother’s question and my quick response kept floating to the front of my mind, I decided it was the day to read “You Don’t Look Adopted,” by Anne Heffron. A few days before leaving London, I had not heard of this book, but while I was making last minute psychology-book purchases to read while working on my own book, an algorithm recommended it to me. The reviews said it was necessary reading for every adopted person, and even though I felt skeptical, I decided to bring it along, in case in my writing I found it necessary to understand how other adopted people felt, so I could show how different I was—how even among a class of people widely considered misfits, I didn’t fit.
I expected Heffron’s book to dwell on this aspect that made me feel different and alone, but instead, I found myself underlining the first sentence: Most of my life I have felt both real and not real. A few years ago, during an intense episode of dissociation, I begged my partner at the time to assure me I was real, because I really didn’t know. I flashed back to the hours I spent propped on the sink in our downstairs bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror and saying, over and over, “You aren’t real. You are a robot. You aren't real.” I’d found myself in that position over and over, whenever I felt myself slipping from reality, and I’d never associated that practice with having been adopted, but in Heffron’s book, she talks about how adopted kids stare in the mirror because they are searching for themselves.
I kept underlining, and when the time came for my therapy session, I excitedly read paragraph after paragraph to her, including these, which I’d surrounded in stars and heavy lines:
You will hear all sorts of things that, the speaker will most likely claim, have nothing to do with adoption.
But children born to their parents were created while adoptees were chosen, and the problem there is that in order to be chosen we first had to be unchosen. The fact of the matter is that it’s hard not to take being given up by your mother personally.
Becoming your own person sounds like a wonderful thing, and it did to me, too. But overshadowing that desire is a greater fear of separation. The fear that becoming your own person equals losing your parents equals losing safety equals dying. I think this is the glitch in the brain many adopted children have that the world at large doesn’t understand. It happens quickly and it doesn't get talked about, but it is there. Remember, the moment the baby is born, everything he knew for nine months disappears suddenly. This baby has a pre-verbal thinking mind, and I believe it stores this sensory memory, and some people—I don’t know why it affects some people more than others—spend the rest of their lives waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the world as they know it to disappear yet again, and so they develop all sorts of defense mechanisms to prevent this from happening. The inability to attach in a healthy manner to another human being is a popular one. I’ve basically perfected it and have therefore spent my adult life pushing love away as vigorously as I have searched for it.
It wasn’t just about being adopted. It was about feeling okay about being yourself after experiencing any kind of trauma when your brain was constantly telling you there was danger ahead and that, at any moment, the other shoe was about to drop and you were going to be in deep shit.
As I read to my therapist, I felt like I had found some sort of key, but there weren’t any answers—just shared thoughts and feelings, like I’d shared a brain with someone who also knew what “the gaping yawn of loss” felt like. I connected with the fragmentary style of Heffron’s writing, the way each shard of memory or reflection felt slightly different and important, how each seemingly unrelated piece had to be present in order to make the whole. It wasn’t about how adoption affected one aspect of her life, but about how the hunger it created bit into every slice—her work, her relationship with her parents, her parenting, her relationships to food and her body, her romantic life, the challenges she set for herself. I didn't feel excited that she had gone through so much pain because she felt disposable and unreal, but I felt grateful to read that someone else had felt that way, too. It was also encouraging to see that some of the methods I’ve started to use to work through trauma helped her—learning to inhabit her body, exposing herself to her fears rather than guarding against them, choosing to say yes to things that build up her real self (not the selves she creates for other people). Heffron wrote that she wanted to write a book about adoption—it was the one thing she knew she would regret not doing before she died, and it seems that by figuring out how to face herself and use her voice, she started to find ways to value herself and rewrite some of the narratives that her young mind had determined were logical.
This started as a comment in an Instagram story about being grateful for the rainy day that gave me time to read this book. I had more to say, so it evolved into a post, and when that started to get lengthy, I decided it was worth taking my laptop out of the safe to write up some of the thoughts and feelings I’ve been having over the last few days on this topic. I don’t feel like any of this has changed my answer to my brother’s question—and the trauma of losing my first adoptive mom through the custody battle probably is my deepest wound, because she was my mom during the years I was learning how to interact with the outside world, and we were torn away from each other—but I’m grateful for the opportunity to look more closely at this aspect of my story, and grateful to Heffron for writing hers.