"Being"

“Being”

Adoptee and author Joe Soll speaks of people as having “different ways of ‘being’ in the world.” He points to the fact that these differences have the potential of being quite pronounced in an adoptive household, given that there are no shared genetics. I was once told by a therapist that my adoptive parents and I were “cut from an entirely different cloth.”

Dad’s a business professor, Mom’s a nurse. I’m an artist. I visualize my experience this way:

The world is a huge ocean, and Mom and Dad are in a boat. They deal in pragmatics, there on the surface. Steering, refilling the tank, looking at a constant horizon. They aren’t shallow people, but their lives are task-oriented, what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

I live undersea in metaphor and psychology. Everything I experience gets thought, and rethought, and thought about again. And I really need to talk about the thoughts. That’s where the catch came in. My talking was always met with silence. I took the silence to mean that I was being denied the right to be myself and denied their engagement in my life. It made for a very, very lonely youth. A youth of loneliness and rage.

My mom once told me, “You see things that aren’t there.” I finally understand that, for her, those things really aren’t there. She can’t see the squid and seaweed and coral and shipwrecks that I am “being” amongst, down here deep under the ocean’s surface. It’s nice to finally understand that and to be past the rage. It’s hard to stop grieving the loneliness.