Adoptions Secrets but others know something is Different

I was born in the early 1960's and put up for adoption. It was supposed to be a secret but others notice things about me that were different. Although I was loved, I looked nothing like the family I grew up in and one time someone commented on it.. Any comment that I was different than the rest of the family or different would make the mother that raised me very angry. She would tell me, "Ignore the comment. They don't know anything." I remember overhearing my mother who was very angry about a comment that someone made saying that my brother and I weren't really brother and sister and that I was from a different family. I was all she could do not to tell that person off but she couldn't because the person who made this comment was someone that I didn't know. This was an off handed comment that was made at a social gathering. I always felt that something about me was different but I didn't know what it was. I was never made to feel different from my family, so I thought I was imaging it. I was labeled the girl or woman that was different, odd or distant and was a victim of bullying which was intense at time during 5th-8th grade. I've never had a lot of friends and the friends that I had I rarely got close to as I've been hurt by some many people outside my family (people who were my friends in school would then turn on me), that by the time I got to middle-school, I didn't care anymore. I totally disconnected at this point to people outside my family, as this was my way of protecting myself from being hurt. I put a wall up which was very difficult to break. Perhaps it was because I was too clingy. I don't know. This was something my mom had difficulty understanding as it was believed that someone who was distant, who didn't show any affection towards others came from a dysfunctional family. Sometimes my mom didn't understand me and couldn't understand at times why I felt or thought a certain way. My relationship with men were distant and didn't last beyond six months. In my lifetime, I was unofficially engaged for a couple of weeks to someone I didn't love.. I was not surprised when the relationship didn't work out. I had been abandoned so many times that this was nothing new. It was my MO and the story of my life when it came to men. Eventually I gave up on dating. I never married nor did I have children. Sometimes I have regrets about this but most of the time I don't. One thing which is difficult for people around me to understand is that I have extreme sensitivity to things people do or say to me or others. Teachers in report cards always made the point that I was extremely sensitive to things that I cried when there was no reason to. They couldn't say much when in 4th grade my mother told the teachers that they would be very upset if someone put glue on their chair and they sat in it and it ruined their outfit and the kids laughed about it. I was so upset I started sobbing. At least two of these teachers I know would have used the paddle on any kid who did something like that to them. They would have been furious.. Back then, paddling was used as punishment. I was never paddled. When I was a child, a unkind remark or someone scolding me would bring me to tears and crying. I can pick up when there is tension in a room. I have difficulty being in the same room with someone I know that doesn't like me (I have to tune it out which I can do most of the time). I can't stand being in a room with an individual who has anger issues and I've been able to pick them out when others have either ignored it or questioned my judgement. A couple of times I've had to leave a room or leave the store I was in because the anger I was sensing was so intense that it was scary. My mother always thought that this sensitivity came from the fact that my birth mother most likely was upset while pregnant with me. She wasn't a victim of violence when she was pregnant with me and the family that I was raised in there was no violence which made me wonder how I picked up on people who had a anger issues (perhaps the bullying had something to do with it). When my birth mother contacted me, I later found out that it was very likely that she was a victim of domestic violence or was threatened with violence (not by my biological father). She didn't tell me the detail, but she was in a bad relationship at once point in her life. I started shaking after the phone call ended and they I started to cry picturing her being hurt and then picturing this man coming after me as a child which I have no doubt that this most likely would have happened if I was with her. My crying turned into sobbing uncontrollably which I did for almost an hour I had a very difficult time functioning at work and I was on the verge of tears. This went on for about 2 days. Even typing this is bringing tears to my eyes. I had to talk to the counselor about this. The mother that raised me told me that she should have never told me this. Sometimes I've wonder if my sensitivity to people who were angry was related to perhaps picking up what was happening to her, even though I knew nothing about it at the time. .