Writings

Most people who come to therapy have spent years looking like they are fine. This essay is about what it cost me to be one of them.

Underneath traces the arc from foster care to the Air Force, through decades of managing and surviving, to the years of real therapeutic work that genuinely changed things. And then to what happened when I began interviewing other adoptees and discovered there was still another layer. Not because the work had failed. Because some things can only be understood from the inside of a shared experience.

This is an essay about what it means to think you have arrived somewhere and then find out the map was incomplete.