Who Are You? Really?

Anyone who has read this blog for, oh, longer than two weeks knows I am defined by my adoption. The perceived abandonment follows me everywhere, through marriages and jobs, into dreams and nightmares. It is who I am.

Lately I've been hearing a lot about a woman who is known as Byron Katie. Her Web site states,

The Work of Byron Katie is a way of identifying and questioning the thoughts that cause all the fear and suffering in the world.

In one of the radio shows I was listening to this week, the host—a great proponent of adoption—was talking about how Ms. Katie's work helps people stop focusing on the negatives of long, long ago. She enables them to, instead, build upon all they've accomplished in their lives to see who they truly are today.

Someone said Katie's work is similar to—in the same vein as—Marianne Williamson's work with "A Course in Miracles". I've heard and read some of Williamson's information, have heard her on the radio, and am familiar with the concept of positive affirmations, but for me affirmations just do not ring true. I feel like I'm trying to pull something over on myself, trying to trick myself into believing something that's just not valid.

I want to learn more about Katie and see what her work can do to set free some of the gremlins that roam around my brain.

It can't hurt, right?

(Today's photo was in a large box of photos I brought back from Mother's apartment. It was taken in late 1950, after my family got me in late June of 1950. I was five or six months old in this photo. Jim is five years old. Jerry is seven. The picture was taken in the living room of the house they were living in at the time, on Westminster St. off N. Orange Avenue, near what was then Orlando Sanitarium & Hospital. Six months later we moved into the house on Lake Maitland, where we lived until I went away to college.)