Anne Heffron > Quotes

“When you are in conflict with yourself it’s like you’re a car whose gas pedal is also the brake. It’s hard to get anywhere.”
― Anne Heffron, You Don't Look Adopted

“The problem is that part of my brain likes the ache of longing more than it likes the safety of your company.”
― Anne Heffron, You Don't Look Adopted

“Most of my life I have felt both real and not real.”
― Anne Heffron, You Don't Look Adopted

“The other day, Andrew Glynn, a fellow adopted person, wrote to me and asked when I came up with the term Camp Suck It Up. I had no idea, but his question got me thinking about camps in terms of the stages of grief. I began listing The Stages of An Adopted Person’s Life: 1. Camp Suck it Up, 2. Camp What the Fuck, 3. Camp Fuck It, and then, when it came to the final camp, the camp of I’ve got this, I’m okay now, I could not think of the right name! What exactly is it I was looking to feel? First, I named it Camp Freedom, but it started sounding like a tampon commercial, so I called Andrew back and asked him for his idea. He, too, struggled! We listed off things we thought we wanted, Camp Me, Camp Enough, Camp Peace, but none felt quite right. Finally he said, I just want to feel good and to have a stomach that doesn’t hurt. I made 4. Camp Feel Good, but I’m still thinking about that final camp, and what it is I’m working so hard to feel or be.”
― Anne Heffron, To Be Real : Unedited

“I was always longing for something. Longing in my body was so familiar I didn’t usually notice the feeling; that would have been like a magnet experiencing its own field, the pull toward, the hungry mouth. It was easy to mistake the emptiness of longing as something that wanted filling with M&M’s, time with friends, new clothes, accomplishments, a boyfriend, and it was also easy to be frightened by the ceaseless dark cave call of I am alone and I may die.”
― Anne Heffron, You Don't Look Adopted

“Adopted people aren’t much different from non-adopted people. They just live with more questions. They are the human experience intensified.”
― Anne Heffron, You Don't Look Adopted

“felt I was there to bear witness to my own life and to see it through understanding eyes. Of course I had been afraid to walk to school alone as a child, to be separated from my mother. Of course I hadn’t been able to connect with a boy and have a real boyfriend. Of course I had gone to Bergson’s by myself as a kid, sat at the counter, and ordered an ice cream sundae. Of course my stomach had hurt most of the time. Of course I’d been addicted to sugar. Of course I’d had trouble focusing on my homework. Of course I’d stolen money from my parents and from anyone I babysat. Of course I’d had trouble returning books on time to the library. Of course I’d skipped school a lot. Of course my friends in high school had meant the world to me, and of course I’d had no idea how to make new friends as an 18 year old.”
― Anne Heffron, To Be Real : Unedited

“So many words, yet again, just to describe what was going on. I feel like that’s been such a big part of my life as an adopted person. You ask me what’s happening in my life, and the next thing you know I’ve buried you in details. Everything seems to need an explanation because nothing is simple.”
― Anne Heffron, To Be Real : Unedited

“Since an infant is born with a sense of self not separate from the mother, I believe part of my brain took a nosedive in the gap between mothers, and part of my brain decided I must not exist, and in some crazy unexplainable way, nothing changed in that part of my brain, even as an adult.”
― Anne Heffron, You Don't Look Adopted

“Even if I don’t like you much, I have to keep trying to convince you to love me because the force controlling the wheel in my brain is telling me this is an urgent matter.”
― Anne Heffron, You Don't Look Adopted

“I was four people jammed into one: I was the me that my mom wanted; I was the me I would have been if my birth mom had kept me; I was the me I would have been if another family had adopted me; and I was the me that was just me. I couldn’t commit to one, and so I was a little bit of all four, and this made me unpredictable and unknowable both to those around me and to myself.”
― Anne Heffron, You Don't Look Adopted