In Search of Origin

Healing is a non-linear and subjective journey. What feels and looks like healing to me is going to be very different for someone else. There’s a certain amount of grace in the process of learning to hold space for ourselves while we determine what our individual healing looks like and how we approach it. It’s never a one-size-fits-all, nor is it finite. There is no point A to point B. This is what I know to be true because of my own healing journey that began about a decade ago when I was lost and found myself by finding my voice and the path to healing by returning to the creativity that has always been a lifeline for me.

I’m an adoptee and I have spent most of my life searching for the missing pieces, searching for answers to questions I didn’t always have the words to articulate. In the absence of answers and the absence of being able to ask questions I found other ways to cope. I was a good student, I won awards, I was the star of the school play, I was the president of the student government, I was an all-around overachiever. I stayed safe by staying busy. I knew that something felt wrong but, in my tweens, teens, and twenties I didn’t have access to what it was or why I constantly felt sad, confused, and out of place. There’s a term for this in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—it’s called monachopsis: the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place or maladapted to one’s surroundings. I wish I had known this word back then so that I could begin to describe the internal confusion I felt but couldn’t name. Instead, I stayed busy and made myself fit in by being the leader, taking charge of projects and activities, being on teams, and developing my aptitude as a shape shifter. I was good at reading the room, blending in when I needed to and standing out when it was to my advantage. I was good at taking care of people, at seeing the big picture, while always paying attention to the details. I was also an emotional volcano ready to erupt at any moment.

I felt out of control all the time, so I controlled my external environment by controlling my schedule. If I kept my schedule jampacked I could avoid feeling the intense emotions that were always bubbling beneath the surface. I know now that this level of control was, and is, a trauma response, a survival strategy meant to keep me safe. It was one of the ways I began to “control the controllables.” It’s a tool I still use when my nervous system gets activated and the scared little girl I still carry with me shows up.

Alone and confused, shy and scared

Hoping for tomorrows that will never come

Dreaming impossible dreams

Big sad eyes looking out at the world

Looking and searching, wondering what’s to be

That’s the Little Girl inside of me

That little girl showed up in the first poem I ever wrote when I was 14 years old and full of overwhelming feelings that I didn’t understand were connected to the unacknowledged grief, loss, and trauma that I carried because of being separated from my mother at birth and spending nine months in interim foster care before going home with my adoptive parents. I started writing because I needed an outlet for all of the feelings that were constantly spilling over; staying busy wasn’t enough. At this same time I also began to do community theatre, which became another outlet for me, one that helped me use my emotions in a constructive way. Writing and theatre became the creative outlets I needed to stay alive. The poems I wrote were a safe place to express what I was unable to say any other way, and theatre gave me the chance to step into someone else’s life and use my excessive emotions to feel and see the world through the character’s eyes, which was easier than doing it through mine.

Creativity was a lifeline for me then, and became a lifeline again when, in my late thirties, I hit a wall. I was stuck and I knew that I needed to do something differently, I needed to understand why I felt like a hamster running on a wheel all the time and why I wasn’t moving forward in my life. In his discussion of the creative personality, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says that “creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.” I will add to this that adoptees are also remarkable for our ability to adapt to any situation, but it can be challenging to reach goals without a clear sense of self or a clear story about our beginnings. I realized, finally, that I needed to begin to look inward because all of the external strategies that I had been using to feel in control were starting to fray at the seams. I could no longer hold myself together when I didn’t actually know who that self was.

As adoptees, we want to know who we look like, where we come from, and if there is any truth to the cliché that blood is thicker than water so we search for clues wherever we can. Given past life transitions, adoptees tend to be open to and aware of changes in their environments. This was certainly true for me and was precisely why acting came so naturally to me—I was highly attuned and aware. I was also curious. Living in a constant state of curiosity, coupled with my hypersensitivity to myself and my environment, helped me as an adoptee to survive highly unusual circumstances.

Creativity becomes a mode of survival because it links us to our own unconscious suffering and helps keep us tethered while we try to make sense out of chaos. Gilda Frantz writes that “creativity has within its complex nature the ability to heal” and “I have found that being in touch with the unconscious through the imagination is so healing when one is suffering.” Even when we can’t yet name the pain, we, as adoptees, know it is there, so we seek to instinctively heal ourselves by using our imaginations and exercising creativity to make sense of our lives. We create stories, we dance, we paint, we play, and through these pursuits we discover our resilience and our capacity to think differently; we survive.

So, how did I find myself? I began to write again. I wrote about being adopted for the first time and I struggled to tell a story that was mine. I kept regurgitating the story that I had been told my whole life, the one that I had been handed and never questioned. I went back to my poetry journals and I began to see the expression of trauma laid out over many pages and many years. Poems that, if anyone had asked me to share, might have helped the adults in my life, including my therapist, to see the source of my pain and confusion. Instead, it took my own capacity for survival and creativity to begin to understand the little girl whose story needed to be told. I had not been able to see her until I reread those poems and began to write my first personal narrative, Unanswered Questions.

In the absence of being able to talk and ask questions about being adopted I know that poetry, art, and creative play/drama can, and do, provide outlets for the unconscious trauma carried by adoptees. Psychologist Sophia Richman says that:

The creation of narrative is an important aspect of the therapeutic experience…The narrative that emerges through artistic self-expression helps to organize experience and give it a context and a meaning. It can put one in touch with deep inner knowledge that is not readily available in the conscious waking state. Self-discovery is an exhilarating experience; it is affirming, organizing, and empowering.

The act of struggling through writing Unanswered Questions, which is also a phrase that shows up in many other adoptees’ writing and stories, showed me that I did have a story to tell and that it mattered. It also helped me begin to contextualize and make meaning out of my life, my choices, and my internal chaos for the first time. I began to find my voice and I began to honor the voice of the little girl who didn’t know how to be heard all those years ago.

I’m two me’s

The me you see and the me I can’t be

I have two stories — one I know and the other that’s a mystery

I’m happy and I’m sad

I’m sometimes dark and sometimes light

I can’t decide if I belong or if I’m part of something else

My heart hurts for reasons I can’t explain

Sometimes I want to scream but I don’t know if anyone will really hear me

I try to do what’s right but what if I’m wrong?

I try to forget the things I never knew to begin with and pretend that I’m all right

But I’m two me’s and they’re always in a fight

Two me’s is a confusing way to be

Poetry has the ability to heal and transform by allowing the writer to emotionally express pain and trauma in a way that not only releases accumulated stress but also creates a connection to our younger selves and others. In his work with “troubled” adolescents, Morris Robert Morrison shares, “Though the poet speaks for himself, the reader (or listener) discovers his own psyche, his own thoughts and feelings, being expressed. He is not so alone as he had imagined himself.” Because adolescent and adult adoptees sometimes feel alone and isolated in their feelings and experiences, and may also feel extreme guilt or shame about these feelings due to the potential of being perceived as selfish or ungrateful, poetry and writing to express offer us a way to find healing and connection with others and can help us begin to make sense of our pasts in order to more fully live in the present and plan for the future.

It’s imperative for adoptees to be able to make sense of their lives and experiences in order to feel whole. In being allowed to tell our stories and be witnessed and heard, we can begin to heal the pain of the past. Being able to tell truthful stories about who we are and where we came from, through the lens of security rather than doubt, adoptees can begin to empower themselves and feel less alone. Utilizing the tools of poetry and expressive writing are forms of creativity that allow me and other adoptees to connect to our pain, give it form, and construct meaning out of chaos. My experience of being adopted is a subconscious one; I have no memory other than what is planted deep in my unconscious mind and has flowered into fears and anxieties throughout my life. I know now that writing has allowed me to work through my own confusion, grief and pain and come to a greater understanding of myself and the world. I have enabled my own healing process through creative practice and become an agent in my own life as a result. I have been able to let go, move forward, and thrive, and I believe that one path to healing for other adoptees lies in creativity and in the use of expressive writing and poetry.