Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

my survival from the very beginning. Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and

but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because

can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.

Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt.

had to be able to tell my own. Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself.

All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate,

thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been

of early separation from the love object that is the mother, a screaming baby wasn’t a broken-hearted

I had lost the warm safe place, however chaotic, of the first person I loved. I had lost my name and my identity. Adopted children are dislodged. My

try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found.

isn’t repression, but it is about finding a container.

first one was not my fault but all adopted children blame themselves.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open – the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index

sense of energetic quiet that I still find so seductive.

hid the self that I was and had no persona to put in its place.

great thing about Oxford was its seriousness of purpose and the unquestioned belief that the life of the mind was at the heart of civilised life.

was like living in a library, and that was where I had always been happiest.

the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

the untamed open space of our imaginations. Reading is where the wild

that order should proceed from love.

Something that happened a long time ago, yes – but not the past. This is the old present, the old loss still wounding each day.

psyche is much smarter than consciousness allows. We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.

But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place. Where are you?

know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies – unconscious strategies – to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate,

I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.

The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up me had to tell it to her.

Adoption begins on your own – you are solitary. The baby knows it has been abandoned – I am sure of that. Therefore, the journey back should not be done alone. The

Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little. Feeling is frightening. Well, I find it

The lost loss I experience as physical pain is pre-language. That loss happened before I could speak, and I return to that place, speechless.

MY MOTHER HAD to sever some part of herself to let me go. I have felt the wound ever since.

We need better stories for the stories around adoption.

I think I am lucky. How do you say that without dismissing or undervaluing things for her?

Adoption is so many things at once.