How can you live, when all you’re energy is in surviving?
There’s an Oscar Wilde quote on my kitchen wall “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” I look at it every day and think about living my life to the fullest. I often say I want to die with no regrets. That is not to mean I won’t make mistakes. To me it means I want to seize every opportunity that will progress my story, life and healing. One example would be exhausting every avenue to find my biological siblings. I had to find them because even if they rejected me, that would have been the truth of my story, it would have been information. If I had not found them, I would still be left wondering.
Until I was 29 years old and went to therapy for the first time, I was doing my best to live fully. But I was operating from a dysregulated, trauma state. A lot of my behavior had strong narcissistic tendencies because I was desperate to connect and be loved and accepted. I was not truly living, I was surviving. I am learning to be kind to my pre-therapy self because she was doing the best she could to stay on the earth and maintain the resemblance of a normal “life”.
Therapy and the adoptee community have transformed me. From the first Internal Family Systems experience in 2008, my personality shifted, and I had more empathy for the rest of the world. I began to see the reality of my trauma and experience. It has been a long journey over 14 years, and I can happily say I do not recognize the person I was before the start of this process.
In a recent adoptee group, we were discussing what we had lost as a result of being adopted. Besides the obvious – being raised by biological parents who wanted us, with biological siblings and around people who looked and acted like us, what came to the surface for me was my potential. All my energy was spent on surviving the trauma of relinquishment and the unhealthy emotional environment I was raised in, so I was not free to succeed at my natural abilities or move through life in a healthy manner. My potential was stunted. I will never get to redo my high school academics, friendships, college choice, career choice. I remember always trying to find the path of least resistance to achieve my goal, what is the shortcut. I was spending too much energy on surviving emotionally and needed to make everything else quick and easy. I made a lot of mistakes and bad choices. Sadly, I often experienced imposter syndrome because I could not fully immerse myself in a role, task or experience or because I had taken the shortcut.
We all know we can’t go back, but we are allowed to mourn what should have been. With the hindsight of 43 years and countless hours in therapy and support groups, I can tell you the process is worth it. Reclaiming the life you should have had allows you to start LIVING for yourself instead of surviving for others.
The Unalome is the symbol of this unwinding and healing. Right now, I am somewhere in the middle, but I’m closer to that straight line than ever. You are allowed to have agency in your life and you deserve to do more than just survive.
Much adoptee love to you.
Lora