I was always longing for something. Longing in my body was so familiar I didn’t usually notice the feeling; that would have been like a magnet experiencing its own field, the pull toward, the hungry mouth. It was easy to mistake the emptiness of longing as something that wanted filling with M&M’s, time with friends, new clothes, accomplishments, a boyfriend, and it was also easy to be frightened by the ceaseless dark cave call of I am alone and I may die.

Since an infant is born with a sense of self not separate from the mother, I believe part of my brain took a nosedive in the gap between mothers, and part of my brain decided I must not exist, and in some crazy unexplainable way, nothing changed in that part of my brain, even as an adult.

The problem is that part of my brain likes the ache of longing more than it likes the safety of your company.

Even if I don’t like you much, I have to keep trying to convince you to love me because the force controlling the wheel in my brain is telling me this is an urgent matter.

Adopted people aren’t much different from non-adopted people. They just live with more questions. They are the human experience intensified.

Most of my life I have felt both real and not real.