Courage

I don't particularly think of myself as courageous. I live in uneasy relationships with both fear and anxiety. I have learned to denigrate myself and be silent, often to my own detriment.

I have been experimenting in therapy and real life with the idea that my thoughts, concerns, and feelings are valid and worthy of expression. This might seem obvious to most people, but for me, and other adoptees I know, it's not quite that simple.

In the past when I dared speak my mind about my feelings, I was cut off ("Oh, but look at your wonderful parents/life/brain/experiences...!") or even worse, ignored. A lifetime of silence and lack of validation did a number on me. I internalized not being important, and not having worthwhile thoughts, except in the realm of academia, although I suffered even there from an adviser who sabotaged my career.

I intuited a pattern from the repeated denigration: if I am ignored, it must be that I am wrong/unworthy/inconsequential. This conclusion was clearly faulty, but it didn't help that it was set in my youth when I didn't have the acuity to see the big picture, and when I lived in a place of clannish mediocrity where teachers accused me of LYING when I said I'd lived in England and visited Paris. I hoped, but wasn't sure, that there was a world in which I would be welcomed and loved.

In retrospect, I see that the problem wasn't ME, it was the people around me who weren't listening, and who dismissed me due to their own baggage. This may sound narcissistic, and I certainly don't mean it that way, but it is true. The result of my negative experiences was that I developed an intense emotional trigger when I am invalidated or dismissed. When I feel that I am being brushed off, I quickly become madly anxious or rabidly angry; a person can only handle being silenced for so long.

For example, a therapist I was seeing last spring told me that I was making a mountain out of a molehill when my brother ended our relationship via e-mail, because, after all, I'd only met my brother once. I should put it all into perspective and see that it was just like a one-night-stand. When she said that to me, I became livid. Where had she been in all the months previously, when I discussed phone calls and letters and that my brother welcomed me as family? What else did she sleep through? Why was I paying her money to be an idiot? She was taken aback by the intensity of my anger, but to me, it was justified. She had gouged her pointed assumptions into an open wound in my heart, and I had to protect myself with all I had. She apologized, but it took me months to be able even to begin to forgive her.

I don't see myself as strong or courageous, although courage is perhaps exactly what I am drawing on, despite being thickly enmeshed in self-doubt. I do put myself way out on a limb and extend myself to my first family, although the results have been quite painful. And yet I keep trying, with them and other people I love. The alternative--being a skeleton or secret--isn't an option anymore.

Perhaps the most courageous thing I have done in the past two years is to learn to value myself, although that is certainly a work in progress.