This is my final post to Empty Cereal Box. However, I will leave the blog visible for reference, but not open to comments. I have learned a lot about myself and appreciated being a part of the online adoptee community for the past five years, but now it’s time to lift my chin toward the horizon and move on into what life brings me from here on. I wish you well and especially encourage you to browse the links posted in the tabs above. Maybe you will find a bit of valuable information there that can help you along your way. Thank you for visiting.
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I woke up this morning in a strange state that must have related to the time that surrounded my birth. As a newborn and this morning I was filled with an irrational rage and an uncontrollable terror intermingled with helplessness. That combination of emotions has frozen inside me and it is how I deal with my entire life. It’s a terrible way to deal, I know. I’ve been seeing a CBT therapist on sliding scale, but she’s just not getting down into that really dark discomfort. I think hypnotherapy is next, but right now I don’t have a job and I can’t afford it.
The thing about being adopted is about intrusion, the traumatic memory of that first abandonment, and constriction. a shutting down or surrendering to the situation at hand, being in the “wrong” family. Intrusion makes you hyper-alert to a possible repetition of the past trauma or the feeling that one needs to make trauma happen. The threat of annihilation or the urge to make concrete is an experience I might have had, but can’t remember–dying. Even if the present environment is safe, it doesn’t feel that way. In the case of constriction or numbing, the adoptee is in another state of consciousness, where she can’t be hurt by painful memories. This state is characterized by emotional detachment, indifference, complacency, and passivity. This is the state adoptees are in when everyone thinks she is daydreaming. It is almost as if she is in trance. She is feeling paralyzed, unable to integrate the trauma and get on with life. Mothers are not supposed to leave their babies. The adoptee is unable to make sense of either natural or divine order.
Unresolved grief over some long-forgotten or repressed loss may be the root of much of that which is considered clinical depression in our society. Those who experience loss need permission to feel their loss and the time and means to process it. They are suffering as a result of society’s ignorance, and its use of denial as a major defense against pain and paradox. Although blaming the victim is often a phenomenon of trauma, (rape victims and battered women), being separated from their biological mothers and handed over to strangers in the adoption process is the only trauma where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful. They are not grateful; they are grieving, and the original abandonment and loss are the sources of many other issues for the adoptee.
One of these issues for me is chronic writer’s block. Related to my writer’s block s my avowal that I’m unemployable. This society would see my statement as denial of my own laziness. I’ve always said no one will hire me, I won’t get the job. When an interviewer or employer rejected me sometime in the past, I now feel paralyzed by that initial rejection. I see it as a rejection of my person. That I am a failure. This fear of rejection is accompanied by a fear of success, my inability to believe I’m competent, a self rejection of my talents and capabilities which sabotages my success. I need to get one more advanced degree to prove that I have a right to exist. Workshops that pulverize your manuscript aren’t just about the manuscript. For me they have pulverized me as a person; they are forms of complete rejection. I am traumatized again, this time from the workshop experience, and writing has become a dreadful, fearful, malicious thing that threatens to rise up from the page and strip me of any feelings of worth. And because numbness and emotional detachment are my coping strategies I find it nearly impossible to access those parts of me that matter most to a fiction writer: my emotions. So I write from the neck up. It’s safer that way, like wearing water wings when all you’ve ever wanted to do, as a poet, an artist, a fiction writer, is to dive deep into the water. Writing about ideas has always been safer for me than writing about feelings.
The search for Self has always been my mission both as a person and as a writer. That’s because that that Self (which was inseparable from my biological for nine months) was annihilated upon the separation from her. I’ve always felt as if “I” was something that got lost between the hospital and the strangers who adopted me. So, my search for Self is intimately connected to the search for my biological mother. I did search for her and my search ended in learning that she had died many years earlier. Literally, my search for Self was a Dead End.
I looked up the term “disassociative identity disorder” and learned that those who have this are alert and aware of the difference between reality and non-reality, but everything around them feels like the rehearsal for a dream. If a writer has difficulty knowing who she is, that is, has a fluid, chameleon-like identity that she put on like a coat to fit in to a strange family, how can she find her way into herself through writing, when that self was never really there to begin with?
I end this post with an open-ended question, which is how my life began.
