It’s My Birth Mom’s Fault. But It’s My Responsibility.

It’s easy to blame our problems on things outside of our control, and sometimes it’s even justifiable. But it also gets us off the hook when it comes to doing anything to better our situation. Instead of choosing action, we choose to remain stuck, often hoping someone else will come heal us.

Trust me when I say, “this is not a fun revelation to come to.” It’s hard to accept that we’ve made the choice to stay stuck. We want to believe that someone out there is holding us captive in here. But the truth is, as painful as our experience may be, we always have the option to choose differently, even decades later.

I may be able to blame my adoption for the identity and trust issues I struggle with today. But how they impact my relationships is on me. Waiting for my biological mother to come clean about why I wasn’t worth holding onto, in hopes of getting some clarity about my inherent value, is to choose to remain stuck.

In a way, choosing differently is akin to choosing faith. But instead of choosing to have faith in a higher power (or a god or a deity) it’s choosing to have faith in yourself.

To choose again, we have to have faith in our own ability to heal and grow so that we can break out of our stuck-ness. We must abandon our old story lines that tell us we can’t move on, and bravely forge a new path into the unknown. A new path in which we can “Marie Kondo” our struggles, thanking them for the role they’ve played in our development, and letting them go when we’ve moved beyond them.

The temptation to linger, or backtrack to the familiar realm of our stuck-ness will overpower us from time to time. It can feel good to demand or expect others to make things right. But the faith in ourselves will expand as we abandon tired story-lines, and our desire for new perspectives will motivate us forward.

My birth mother left me on the steps of a policeman’s house when I was only hours old. True, her actions fundamentally shaped how I view the world and the relationships I’m in. But in holding onto the story-line that suggests she abandon me because I was somehow broken keeps me stuck. Still, there’s comfort in fabricating a story, even a bad story, when there’s nothing else to hold onto. “Bad news,” is still preferred over no news.

Choosing to let go of a story in which I assign myself so little value means I must I take up the responsibility of writing a new story. One that incorporates growth, value, and faith in myself.

With practice, taking responsibility for healing our pains will become more familiar. Our comfort in stuck-ness will be replaced with a comfort in taking responsibility, and our transformation will build momentum. We will rely less on our faith in others to fix us, and find strength to heal from within.

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Whether we want to admit it or not, we always have a choice. We may not be able to control what happens to us, but we do get to decide how we respond. It may feel easy to wait for someone else to alleviate our pain. But in choosing the temporary discomfort that comes with taking responsibility, we have the very real potential of unleashing a version of ourselves that we’ve only ever dreamed of.

It can feel disconcerting to be un-tethered from our familiar stories. To feel adrift without an anchor, unsure as to where we’ll land. But it also shows bravery, which is part of the new story I’ve been writing.

Embarking on this sort of journey doesn’t guarantee that we’ll discover a complete void of stuck-ness. It’s always going to be a temptation to ask others to be responsible for our pain. But even if we arrive at a day far in the future where we feel a little less stuck and a little more responsible, we can be glad for our efforts.

Life is a journey, and not a destination.

Whether we take that journey through the story-lines that keep us stuck, or forge new paths through stories of responsibility, acceptance, and clarity, we will continue to move from one moment to the next. It’s up to us, then, to determine which sort of move we choose to make.

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