Today is my 54th birthday. On this day, a Friday in 1965, my mother gave birth to me, the records say, at the Cleveland Clinic in the holy hour (3-4 a.m.).

She was 16, my birth father, 17.

From what I could tell from the “non-identifying” information I was charged $50 for when I was 23,

Seemingly, I had more in common with my father. Height, basketball, class president, a penchant for trains. My mother, who sacrificed a semester to deal with me, was fond of camping and played a musical instrument.

The Children Services letterhead, since the Red Feather agency (I think that was the name) had long since disbanded adding yet another level of erasure to my already amorphous existential origin- the letterhead and contents of this letter are all I have of my heritage, my genealogy, my DNA. Who you would say I am.

Always watched but never seen

Records of our days, cataloged with no sentiment allowed to obscure the meta data (subjective conjecture need not apply) dot the landscape, forming an infinite grid of mortality.

Mortal implies limits, so an infinite grid of solely self-aware beings, our qualia, in particular, not involving anyone or anything else, carries each individual’s uniqueness, believing we are the onliest as our way of coping with the fact that as far as we know, this existence is finite.

I tell you bout the onliest man I knowed come from Virginia.

Self-awareness consciously knows and understands character, feelings, motives, and desires.

feelings, motives, and desires.

There are two broad categories of self-awareness: internal self-awareness and external self-awareness.^[3]

External self v Internal self

These mean very different things to you and me.

You see, by our society’s standards, I have no reference for the internal kind. Everything I got I learned without the leg up of familiar tradition, unspoken understanding and qualifying acceptance. In a way, I’ve always had to prove I am not a mistake even though clearly that is all I amounted to in the end, a foolish mistake for my mother to regret.

For some adoptees, particularly those who’ve experienced early childhood trauma such as neglect or abuse, it may be difficult to form emotional bonds. Some studies suggest that adoptees may also be at higher risk for depression, anxiety, learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or substance abuse.

This started as a very different piece but between the narcissist showing me his drawing without caring about my writing kind of interrupted the flow.

The fact that I can’t really ever relax or do something mildly extravagant because I can never seem to get ahead, I’m terrible at getting reimbursed and in general, there are a million things I want to do, see, hear, and learn and chasing down the ability to just survive (it’s been that way for 20 years in the film and television industry) isn’t really my thing-the fact that I can’t really celebrate isn’t where I had hoped to be by now.

I’m tired. Tired of this particular existence that, the longer I live, seems more and more futile. Everything we were told was either a lie or a myth and now I’m in no position to take on the world as I once was, having been severely beaten, tortured and most recrntly mugged and stabbed in the past three years.

That’s not even the half of it. That’s not even what makes me sad. It’s the lack of friends I find myself enduring these days. The sadness just never goes away.