Break On Through to the Mother Side

Hey all, did you know that the day destroys the night and night divides the day? 

Tune into episode 5 to hear author/writing coach Anne Heffron and I get psychedelic.

We talk rocky reunions, wrestling with our demons and the psychological efficacy of binge eating. 

And, of course, breaking on through.

Anne Heffron is the author of You Don’t Look Adopted, Truth and Agency: Writing Ideas for Adopted People, and co-writer of the movie Sleep No More. 

You can find her blog and read more about her writing classes at anneheffron.com. 

She had a super time being a guest on Mike’s podcast and believes he is headed for great success in podcast land with that voice of his. 

This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical or legal advice.



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Produced by: Trout Sound GbR Trupiano & Staudt copyright 2024

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Transcript

 Mike: Hi, Anne. 

Anne: Hey, Mike. 

Mike: I'm so glad you can be here. 

Anne: Thanks, I'm so honored you asked. 

Mike: So, your name's Anne, theoretically. Do you know your original name? 

Anne: It's Sarah. 

Mike: And you know the last name?

Anne: Sarah Stennard. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. That's how I say it. 

Mike: How long have you known? 

Anne: When I was, I think a teenager, maybe. I found some paperwork in my file and I thought the name was typed there. It was a mistake and then I asked my mom about it and she said, "oh yeah, I forgot. "

Mike: Where was the file? 

Anne: In our den. We had, in a bookcase, we had this gray metal file holder, and that's where important paperwork was and so there was a file that said Anne, a file that said John, and a file that said Sam, for all the kids, and that was our adoption papers, and I used to just like to open my file and go through them, you know, not knowing what anything really meant.

Just sort of looking at them. So it was open. It was open for me. It was not a problem for me to look at those things. But I never sat with one of my parents and had them go through them with me or talk to me about, not that I remember. 

Mike: So you knew from a young age you were adopted but the files were just there and you didn't know what was in it?

Anne: Yeah. I was just curious, you know, I mean, I could see that it was how much I cost. I could see that it involved legal paperwork. Years later, after my mom died - so, this is less than maybe ten years ago, no more, maybe fifteen years ago - I asked my dad, I think, I forget how this went, but I asked somebody where my file was, and, one of, I can't remember if my mom was alive then or not, but they said they threw them out because it made them sad, and that for me was, you know, beyond the pale.

I didn't know that my my paperwork could be thrown out by them either my mom . I really like I the past is so blurry to me But it was either my mom or my dad when they were sort of sort of downsizing, which is shocking.

Mike: People, magazines, adoption paperwork. 

Anne: Yeah. Exactly. Whoops, there they go.

Mike: Do we need that? No.

Anne: Yeah, does this go in recycle or trash?

Mike: She doesn't want that, does she? 

Anne: Yeah, it's not hers. It's not about her anyway. 

Mike: I wonder, I don't know how much I cost. But do you know? I'm guessing, I have no idea. I don't know what it would be. 

Anne: Yeah, I don't remember. I just remembered seeing the number and, you know, it wasn't a huge number, but it was a number.

Mike: Was it under a thousand? I don't know why the price $600 - not for you, but for me, for 

Anne: some reason. Yeah. I think around. That makes that sounds that resonates 

Mike: 60s. Like, yeah, that might be 5, 

Anne: 000. Yeah. Yeah. Like a really nice cut of beef. Something you'd have to get in Japan. 

Mike: I found out my dad's my mom's name when I was 28.

So Ludwig was her last name. And I found out she named me Mark and then I found out I was like four, four and a half years ago. I found my dad's side of the family. So I finally knew his name at almost 51. So amazing. You knew at such a young age. Yeah. I mean, in a sense, I don't know, from, from an outsider perspective.

But I 

Anne: had no sense of what to do with it. You know, it felt so outside, like, I knew the name, but it didn't feel [00:04:00] like it was something that would connect me. It was like being given a gold coin, but not knowing how to spend that money. It'd 

Mike: make things more confusing. Were you a little, like I was always disoriented.

Anne: Oh yeah. I mean, disoriented is a great. We're always disoriented. There's no North star if you don't have 

Mike: roots. So you're like 17. So it's before college and then before college and you've got two names. Yeah. 

Anne: And, you know, it was sort of like an interesting little fact, right? Like this is something else that makes me special.

This is something else that separates me from people, but it wasn't until I dropped out of college that I, I thought I could use this name to get a search angel. I heard about that somewhere. So when did you start searching? I started, um, no, I think sort of in, in, in between dropping out of college. I, there was, there was an organization in a, in a local town I'd heard about, maybe through a therapist.[00:05:00] 

So, um, I, I hired them, you know, it was very, It was very cheap, but I had no money, so even cheap was like a big deal. And the deal was that if they found your person, then you paid them some money. Oh yeah, it was Susan Dart at Adoption Connect, I think, maybe it was in Lexington. And um, so they did, it took years, I think, but they did find, um, they did find her and they sent me this.

And it had a picture of her, of my birth mother, her high school picture, um, some pictures from her yearbook. And I think I, I think I wrote to her, you know, what's funny is I actually don't remember what happened. It's all, the whole story, the butt end of the story is that she didn't want a connection. But I found it.

So I've never seen her in person, seen photos. I think what really like [00:06:00] my parents throwing away my information, what bewildered me is I threw, I sent my birth mother a picture of me holding my daughter thinking like, who could resist this, right? And the fact that that didn't do anything, it confused my feeling of like how you connect with people and my sense of importance.

Um, there's more of that sense of bewilderment and disoriented, you know, wow, if my own birth mother isn't interested in me and my child, I don't understand 

Mike: the world. I can see how it could almost compound it. If you've got your own child there. Right, right. It's like Jesus, both of us. Right. Did she, you don't know anything about her?

Did she, does she have any other 

Anne: kids? Yeah, she has, um, three kids and, um, I, I met them all. Yeah, it was really, um, interesting. And, um, They, they were very kind to me [00:07:00] and then I, I just wrote too much and I, I, I wrote a blog post that I think I, I think I named it something like you owe me, bitch. And I was writing it, um, sarcastically to myself about my attitude towards my birth mother, but they didn't take it.

They missed the sarcasm and they just read it straight. So the response was immediate and the door shut. 

Mike: One of the reasons I'm doing this, like I've tried to have a life where adoption is not such a main part of my life, you know, and I can focus on other things like ostensibly normal people, but it's, I seem to feel better when I am in this world.

Talk about it. I think I'm perpetually trying to process this so they think that's why I decided to do this plus I'm I found my family, you know, both sides, and I'm a secret, you know, to a great deal of them. So I'm trying to get clear on the secrecy, you know, what does it mean to me? Is it okay to be? [00:08:00] A secret still, could you talk to your family about being adopted?

It sounds like they're pretty open. 

Anne: Um, my dad was my mom. It wasn't her favorite subject, you know, but what you just said, I think is so important. And I, um, I think it's wonderful that you're doing this podcast. And I, I have this sense that the amount of time, if you put being a secret on one side, and then you put sort of what the cost is.

On the other side, it seems it's like a drowning person just continually trying to reach for something to hold on to. I'm not sure. I keep telling myself I'm done with adoption and okay, I've written this now I'm done. And I, I am starting to wonder if that's ever, if that's healthy, you know, that what if this is a lifetime of grappling?

Like, what if I allow myself, because part of it is just being embarrassed to talk about it so much. You know, like the [00:09:00] world, so many people would like me to be done with it, because the narrative of when you have a problem is you face it, you overcome it, and then you move on. But, um, I keep wanting to move on.

I would really like to move on. This adoption, it's like an artichoke. I mean, there's just the leaves just keep coming, you know? And it's like, Oh man, when am I going to get to the, to the heart? I don't know. It's not human nature is to connect. I mean, that's how we survive. That's how, you know, essentially you and I are the same person, right?

Like we're just blips of. Consciousness. And we're so connected. And so if you deny me that connection, that's going to bewilder my entire system, you know, because it's not, it's not 

Mike: human. Yeah. When you think about it, I always have this image. I don't know where we were at a pool or a park or something.

And I saw a mother walk away from her, her little kid for I mean a fairly little kid for 10 seconds or something and just the kid [00:10:00] screaming and I thought it really hit home for me then I thought oh my god because apparently I screamed for two years and which is read for two years to scream 

Anne: for two years that's you're persistent I mean with that whole you know my friend Pam Cordano talks about call and response and that.

You know, a baby calls to the parents and they respond and that's what creates a healthy relationship. And, but generally if a call isn't answered, the baby shuts down and the fact that you didn't shut down, I think says a lot about your character, right? Like, like you, you are not a quitter. I think that's amazing.

Mike: Yeah. Well, thank you. 

Anne: It's so punk. Like, fuck you out here. 

Mike: I'm still here. Yeah, I'm still here, still red, still angry. 

Anne: Get over here, I'd like some 

Mike: attention. I carry my name around, like I have no attachment to this name, you know? Like the name I have is just [00:11:00] for like legal purposes, is how I look at it now.

Like I found out my dad's name. And I'm, I'm not going to say it for a while, you know, maybe eventually on the show, I'd say his name cause it's still part of the secrecy. Uh, but my mom's name was Ludwig and that's who I see myself as, you know, are you more Ann or are you? Uh, yeah, 

Anne: you know, you know, I did MDMA and psilocybin about six weeks ago.

And part of the, part of the coming out of that. I was realizing my name became this suitcase that I'm carrying around that's, it contains somebody else's history, somebody else's, um, lineage. I'm given this name with the idea that I'm going to carry it on and it's not even mine and I really wanted to shed it.

But the thing is that I'm not the other person either. I'm not Sarah Stenard. I have, that's a, that's a fairy tale. That's a, she wasn't wanted. So I would feel awkward claiming that name. Cause you know, it's like, it's [00:12:00] like walking into a party that you weren't invited to. And I don't really want to invite, invent a name for myself.

That just feels like a burden. Like, okay, now I'm going to invent my own name. I'm 58. Happy birthday to me. Here's my new name. Cause nobody got it right. I'm coming full circle where I'm back with thinking, okay, maybe I can stay Anne Heffern, but I have some resentment when my dad dies. I mean, in some ways I love my dad, but I also, it would be, I would like the experience of having that cord cut.

And getting to be myself without any adoptive parents, like just, what does that feel like? And to not carry their burdens, just so I could almost just catch my breath and say okay. You know, sort of like when Prince reduced his name to a symbol, maybe he had that same kind of feeling. Like, okay, I'm not going to have a name, I'll have a feeling.

My, what would 

Mike: you like to be called? Well, you know, for a while I [00:13:00] was briefly, and I thought about it even longer. And it's still in my mind is using Ludwig as a first name. And then my Italian, cause my dad was born in Italy, say Catalano, for example. If that was Ludwig Catalano. Yeah. Nice. As a nice fusion.

And I still like that. I still think, yeah, I mean, for me, this is a big part of the disconnect. As I walk around, people call me Mike, and I'm not connected to Mike, you know, in my mind, I'm like, well, I'm Mark Ludwig, or I'm Ludwig Catalano. You look 

Anne: like Ludwig Catalano. Well, it's a great name. So you found your dad.

I found my dad. I met my dad. Met him once. Uh, his wife doesn't like Didn't want him to meet me. So that was sort of, so he met me anyway. So then he had to deal with her wrath and it's nice. He emails me every once in a while, like on my birthday, and it's nice to have that connection. But also it's, you know, another time I had to go to camp, suck it up.

To like, have this opportunity to meet, you know, my birth [00:14:00] father and that to have there be these severe limitations, like you can't don't you can't call him wife probably doesn't want to know that you're having a conversation, you know, it's more secrets. So does it make me feel. Clean and alive and lovely.

No, it feels like I'm, it feels like I'm a turtle and my shell is just a little thicker because my having a father of our father comes with all these caveats. So yes, but yeah, 

Mike: yeah, that happened to a friend of mine. In New York, and he just, you know, the wife put down an ultimatum and he chose the wife and that was 

Anne: it.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense, but it also, again, it's inhumane. I think it's inhumane. I think for a person not to understand that there is another being out in the world who could benefit from this connection. But I think, you know, there's There's probably fear about money, you know, does she just, does she want money, which, you know, [00:15:00] I don't.

And, um, I think, you know, yeah, I, I just, I just want a connection. 

Mike: I'm afraid that, I hope that's not part of my story with my paternal siblings. Yeah. 

Anne: It's hard for it not to be, I think. I 

Mike: keep trying to express probably too much that, Oh yeah, we, you know, we're totally financially fine. You know, not in those words, but I have cousins on my dad's side of the family and I think, you know, it's like Antoine Fisher, you know, the movie here just announced to everybody.

Yeah. I want it announced at my dad's bocce hall. Hey, remember that guy? Well, this is his, you know, he had a kid. 

Anne: I just don't think people care that much. It's so funny. It's just sort of like, oh, well, you know. That's cool. Get on with it. We have our lives. You're fine. You have two legs and two arms. And 

Mike: I think that's the thing, like with your dad and those types of situations where the implication is just like, get on with it.

I think everybody thinks, well, I've had a [00:16:00] hard time too. You know, it's just like everybody's had a hard time and then I'm off. I'm often in this place of, well, maybe adoption is just like everything else. Maybe it's not a deeper, hard time. You know, I think it is, but I don't know. I don't know how to prove that other than I've been treading water for decades.

Anne: You know, I'm in a similar place where I do. I do think that our story, that we're different because our story, that our. Our experience is worse than other people's is another way that we separate ourselves. However, the thing that human beings have to encounter this sort of there, there's some generally people have some sort of crisis in their life that leads to growth, but it doesn't, it's, we didn't get a chance to take a breath.

I would love, I was thinking the other day, I would love to go back into my birth mothers. body just for five minutes and knowing that I was going to be given away so I could have five minutes to [00:17:00] prepare myself, you know, so I, I wouldn't come out into the world expecting the normal thing. Like I could have a moment to collect myself and I feel like I just, I haven't ever collected myself.

And, and I think that that's what, what people don't understand about adoptees is that, you know, when they, when they say sort of like, You came into the world running, but we came into the world running and we face planted, like we experienced failure immediately. And I think this is the same for kids in ICU, you know, like.

Kids that are taken from their mother, even temporarily, it's that off and running thing is, is, is interrupted in such a violent way and that establishes the patterns in your brain how you're gonna see the world and I don't know I'm I'm gonna do my second MDMA session next month because I still, I still want to see it.

Can I live? Without this hanging over me, [00:18:00] can I let this trauma go and move on? 

Mike: I read your thing about the, uh, your article about MDMA, and I've thought about it recently, and I'm looking into it. Like, what are you falling into? I, I have that, well, at least I know I'm this, kind of, not miserable, but You know, the only misery of life.

Yeah, it's this idea of, like you're saying, before the faceplant, you know, I don't know what, I don't, I don't know anything. It's been kind of floundering. It's been interesting floundering. You know, I've done a lot of interesting things. I've had people say to me, I envy you. You know, I've lived in multiple places and done a lot of interesting things.

And maybe, I don't know, I feel like I have this false idea that there's like, I want to believe in it. that there's this real self that I can get down to. And then the Buddha says there's not. So what am I, what am I trying to do? 

Anne: But I think there's levels. I mean, what I experienced with the first session of MDMA and psilocybin is that I had pain inside [00:19:00] of me that was unbearable and I got to experience it and now it's out.

And so I think like on a, just a physical level, it's just like, oh, you have a splinter and you've been uncomfortable your whole life. Cause you've had a splinter and someone pulled the splinter out. Your life is still has its ups and downs, but you're not having to deal with a splinter anymore. And I feel like I had.

Extraordinary pain in my body that I probably was too much. I mean, experiencing it on MDMA was great because I wasn't terrible. I didn't feel the terror, but I got to, I got to acknowledge. Oh my gosh, I've been writing about what it's like to be born and to be separated, but I just got to feel it and it's.

Not something I could have experienced, I don't think, without a therapist and, and this medicine that let me experience it without. It's like, I mean, you could get a bone set without being anesthetized, but the pain might make [00:20:00] you black out. So I got to experience the pain of that. So I am on a mission now, I'm writing about it, that we normalize the use of MDMA and psilocybin for adoptees who want to use it.

Because what I want to say is the pain is even worse than you think it is. Your discomfort inside of your body is a raging fire. And everything that you're doing, if you feel this, is to avoid touching it. So you move a lot. You eat a lot, you drink a lot, you don't sit still. And the fact that someone, I could have that splinter pulled out.

I walked around in shock for days. I just couldn't believe this pain is optional. And I want to go and do it again because I can feel, I feel that there's this bag packed in my abdomen. It's like, we're ready to go. I can't touch it myself. 

Mike: Physical pain caused by repression or ignorance of the [00:21:00] emotion. I mean, think 

Anne: about It is physical, though.

It's physical. I think it's, I think it's So tension in the body, if it's held over years and years and years, it's As a massage therapist, if I'm working on someone and I find a trigger point and I press on it, they have blinding pain, you know, and they'll say it's too much. That's not, I'm not even touching their internal organs, you know, I'm just touching their, their fascia and their skin.

And so if we were born and we constricted because we were in fear, the constriction in our body, that affects our organs. I mean, my heart feels so different now. I mean, really, if you break your arm and someone bumps you. You're going to pass out. And I think that if you're separated from your source at birth, the, the, the physical repercussions to your body are, um, off the 

Mike: charts.

I think the things I'm used to, uh, I should not be used to. 

Anne: Exactly. We've normalized being extraordinarily uncomfortable. 

Mike: Yeah. [00:22:00] Tense. I remember I had a therapist here and that was the first that started in like 2014. And that was the first time someone has told me, Oh, you have PTSD. And then what, just because they constantly catastrophize and, you know, live in panic or, you know, whatever, whatever the list was.

Well, I love how you're always, you're out there with your writing and it's all caps. It's like, I'm, I'm here. I noticed in my journaling, as I prepared to start this podcast, I started meditating and committing to journaling every day. And in my journaling, I'm saying, I am sometimes I'm just writing. I am often it's an affirmation.

I am whatever I'm saying, things to really push my buttons. You are amazing. Something like that. Uh, but often it's just like I am, and I, I heard in an interview with the guy, the singer from Run DMC, who is Oh yeah. Darrell McDaniel. And so many of his lyrics are just, I am, I am, I am, I am. That's what he talked about.

You 

Anne: know, I am backwards is Ma [00:23:00] I, it's almost like you're having a conversation, like you're, you're asserting yourself and then you're also starting a conversation with the most important person in your, I love that you write that. That's so, um, brave and desperate. 

Mike: It kind of is. It's like, yeah, this is kind of how I feel with the, with the MDMA too.

You know, not that it's well for me, it's like, okay, you've done the 12 steps innumerable times, you know, you've done the meditation, you know, the yoga, and I guess it's. The issue is still deeper. 

Anne: Yeah. I was really resistant to doing it. I really want to do it myself. And, you know, I, I want to be able to show people my goal is, is to live my best life possible and to take as many people with me as possible because I've dedicated my whole life to this.

And not everyone can do that because they, they have to work and I just find ways to kind of like slide under the radar. So I want to share this, but I wanted to have these, [00:24:00] my friends that were doing MDMA, I, I just thought I can do that. I don't even take aspirin when I have a headache, you know, I feel like I can do this.

But then when I did it, I realized, oh, okay, this is, this is an acknowledgement of. All my life, I've thought I can do this myself, like I can, you know, I have to figure this out myself, but that's not taking, that's, that's without the acceptance that it was so much worse than I thought it was and I can't do this alone because I'm so damaged and that I, to admit that is just.

Like, I don't want to do that, you know, I want to be a strong human. I want to, doing the MDMA made me so much more compassionate for myself because I realized while you were in trouble, you were really, like, if you had that kind of pain in your body, it is, I mean, at one point I said to the therapist, I know now why people should kill themselves.

Because my head hurt so badly. One of, this was, I think [00:25:00] psilocybin helps tell you where there's tension in your body. It hurt so much that I felt like I want to take a gun and I want to shoot my head off. And I thought, wow, this is, this is why some adoptees kill themselves. Because the pain is so extraordinary that, like, of course you're gonna kill yourself, like, there's no other answer.

There's, the pain, the pain has 

Mike: won. Maybe not coincidentally, I've been getting back into true crime, and I was watching a doc last night, horrible, about a home invasion, and one of the two guys who did it was adopted. And like, you're talking about pain, it's bad for the adoptee, you know, because he didn't know his birth family.

And it's bad for society at large. I'm realizing watching this. It's like 100 percent we're creating time bombs, you know, we are, people are just so blithely, Oh, get over it. And it's like, this comes 

Anne: back. No, that cover of the Atlantic magazine last [00:26:00] month, where it was. Something like we, we have to start taking the children or we have to take the children and it was about dealing with immigrants in the United States.

And it's so, it's so, it's the government taking children from families to, to, to try to get some control over the issue. And it's, you know, they're, they're, they are. They are creating mall shooters, you know, they're, they're create their, it's so circular. Our society is just eating its own head. This 

Mike: kid kept it.

I mean, he was in his early mid twenties. He kept a diary and you could see his focus in life was home. His thing was home invasions. He had like 30 by the time of age 25 or something. And that's while he was in and out of prison, I'm pretty sure. And he started keeping a diary after they. You know, murdered this family, kept the diary in prison.

And he was writing, no one is going to have a sense of safety. If I don't, I go through life with no sense of safety, you know, and no home. [00:27:00] And why should they have it? Of course, 

Anne: you know, home invasion, like our, our interior self was invaded. It was invaded by pain. It was invaded by self doubt. And of course, someone's going to go in.

Of course, you're going to watch home invasion because it's going on inside of you. You know, you were invaded, you're invaded by the name Mike 

Mike: and this whole family history. Yeah. This thing just pasted on me this adopted family history. I remember there was a point where I realized, Oh, this is, this might have something to do with being adopted.

Like I would wander around the office sometimes in the winter and just, Like forlornly look up at windows, you know, at life, even if the curtains are closed, not eavesdropping, but just like, oh, that would be nice. That would be nice. And I realized, oh, wow, this is like, this might have something to do with adoption.

Right. I mean, think 

Anne: about it. It's like, um, what if it's like you have, you have two magnets. Right. And they, and they have a pull to each other, but can you imagine, I mean, you're born a magnet and your whole job is to connect [00:28:00] to another magnet and then you don't get it. So all your whole life is going to be driven by this yearning.

And sometimes it will make you do bad things. Sometimes it will make you just feel longing, but it's your. It's the, it's the energetic pull. It's not, it's even, it's beyond awareness, conscious awareness. Of course you're looking in the windows, right? It's like your whole body is so hungry. 

Mike: What was your mode of like trying to connect with the world?

Was it like intellectual, like some people go to an ashram, like a friend of ours went to India. She's in an ashram now. Is that too vague? No. No, Um, did you get married at a young age? Like something, something that's going to fix you. Like I thought I'll figure this out, you know, and I studied political theory.

Yeah. 

Anne: That's such a good question. Mike, it makes my heart break. I feel like, um, maybe that's the biggest question you could ask an adoptee because really, I think my whole life has been about, that's been the central focus of [00:29:00] my whole life. But, but I've had one hand saying, they come in, in one hand. Saying stop.

And so more than anything, I would like to feel connected to, like, really connected to one, even one person without fearing having to endure the daily fear that they hate me or that they're going to go away. And so to avoid. I mean, I've never like fully been available, even my dog. I'm learning and I'm learning through my dog and an 82 year old woman.

I'm living in Boston while I work on the book about the Harvard basketball coach and I'm living with my mom's best friend. And so she's a lovely person and I'm letting myself. Connect with my dog and this 82 year old woman and and going through yesterday, I got irritated and it really scared me. I was so afraid I was going to say something that was gonna be not kind.

And because I have that in me, I can just cut [00:30:00] it and then just get in my car and leave. And to sit with that and not do it, I was sweating, I was in such a bad mood, I went for a walk with a giant bag of popcorn, and I just shoved the popcorn in my mouth for like four miles, I just walked and ate popcorn, and I was like, why are you eating, why do you have to eat this popcorn?

And I thought, it's because I'm blowing apart, my parts are, are exploding, and I am trying to ground myself, because I do not know what to do. So, so the best thing I can do right now is move forward and eat popcorn. And I got through it, and the MDMA really did, has helped settle my nervous system, but this idea of, I think I'm becoming a real person, and, and by that I mean, like, I'm experiencing what it's like to have moods, but then to not do something radical to avoid them, you know, I didn't get in my car and drive off, I stayed.

And I had to sit with that discomfort that I couldn't even name it's [00:31:00] so hard, but also, oh, well, like a certain point when I was walking, I was like, yeah, but can you just enjoy this moment? It's fall. It's beautiful. You have this huge bag of popcorn. Like you're not going to feel bad about it. Cause it's just popcorn.

Like, look at you. You're so lucky. And so it was good to be able to tap into that too. 

Mike: I had some cookies out last night watching this documentary. The whole time I was saying, this is okay, you don't do this all the time. Isn't that funny? 

Anne: Like, that, that you have to, it's that, it's the work of just saying it's okay.

It's that constant self grounding, like it's okay that you're taking care of yourself. It's okay that. You're watching this show and having some cookies and being a person in a room having an experience. 

Mike: This, this hyper self consciousness. Yeah, yeah. So tedious. I know. It's such a good way to put it. Did you ever see this movie, Open Your Eyes?

It's a Spanish movie. It was remade as Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise. Oh, I don't know. I'll watch it. And it's a guy. I've seen them [00:32:00] both. They're both, the Spanish one was great. And even the Tom Cruise one is pretty good. I think Cameron Crowe directed it. Oh, okay. But he doesn't know if he's dreaming, you know, these type of films, I'm like, Oh, yeah, it took me a long time to figure out, oh, that's why these type of films resonate.

Anne: Yeah, yeah, I had a profound experience on the MDMA The therapist pointed out to me that when things get hard, I go into fantasy and so I've been really working with and fantasy is, you know, even in writing, you know, or this thought of it could be better. It should be different. And so this. This idea of, okay, when things get hard, if I just stay and I don't escape mentally, whoa, that I don't know what to, I feel so, so sloppy and I don't know what to do with all these pieces that I think, you know, when you're not embraced, when you're born, everything becomes so difficult because you just don't know if you're okay and there's no pro.

There's no one you can [00:33:00] ask because no one's the right person. It has to come from you. How long were you with your mom? My birth mom? Yeah. Oh, I, I, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if she, I don't, I know she gave birth to me. And then one time I talked to a friend of hers. It was, she, the friend was not happy to be talking to me, but she gave me a moment.

It was super uncomfortable because I tracked her down. She had co written a book with my birth mother. At the end of the very brief, awkward call, she said, you know, I saw you in the hospital and I was thinking, wait, did I hurt myself? Like, when was I in the hospital? And I was so, I just said, oh, and then the call ended and I didn't even get to ask, oh, so you visited my birth mother and me at the hospital?

Like what? There's so many questions. I didn't think to 

Mike: ask, I was just gonna say, my mom was in one of these home for wayward girls, you know, or unmarried mothers. And so I was there. I actually visited it, which was intense. [00:34:00] And then I, I stayed with her. No, I was adopted about eight, about 10 days, I think.

Yeah. I think, but she said she held me once and she didn't. 

Anne: Wow, you were held by her. That's amazing. Anne 

Mike: Heffron, thanks for taking the time. Oh, of course. 

Anne: This was such a pleasure. I'm so happy you're doing this. It's a lot of effort. This is a big I am. Okay, take care. I'll send 

Mike: it to you. You want to hear it?

No. Okay. I know.