You Don’t Look Adopted

Can writing your story save your life? I should have come with a manual. My parents thought they were getting one thing when they adopted me—a baby of their own—when what they got was a human being with a story of her own. As a child, I traded safety for silence. As an adult, I had no idea who I was, why I quit nearly everything I started, why I struggled with things that came more easily to my friends (jobs, relationships, finances, self-esteem), why I seemed hell-bent on throwing myself away. It got to the point where I didn’t care if telling my story was going to kill me: I was going to find a way to tell it because living a life that felt like a lie was unbearable. In order to write this book, I moved away from everything I knew, maxed out my credit cards, borrowed from friends and family, and had lots of sex with strangers. Nearly penniless, I was living like a millionaire in the apartment of a fabulously famous writer. I was finally listening to my own voice. I ate cheesecake for dinner and fell in love with the East Village. I broke almost every rule I ran into because I was afraid this kind of freedom couldn’t go on forever. As I wrote, I lived every day as if it were my last. I was in for such a surprise.