One year ago, I steeled myself as I opened up my laptop and clicked the zoom link sent to me. I felt robot-like. Emotionless, guarded. I nodded my head and provided a curt "yes" as it was required of me. Yes, I wanted to keep my name the way that it was. It made no sense to me to return to a name that belonged to a father I didn't speak to. Yes, I was sure. No, I had nothing else to add. What would have been the point? It wouldn't have changed things. I just wanted it to be over.
As the judge ruled from across a computer screen that the divorce was final, I took a long exhale and shook as I opened up my blog. I had a long cry, and then I wrote about it. Then, I went to work. It didn't seem worth it to make the day any more than what it was. It was both monumental in what I had left behind, and a new page from which I was finally free, after many years of hurt. A symbol of moving on for which the real groundwork had already been done over many hard months. There was nothing left to mourn, nothing left to say goodbye to. Every bridge had already been burned, and with it a cloud over those old memories settled, permeating how I saw those last 5 years of my life. Things would always be different from that day. But that was a closing part of moving on past what I had already grieved for in the months previous. So it didn't make sense to stay home and mope, it made more sense to just step outside and keep going. After all, Covid had robbed me even of a final encounter, of the satisfactory feeling of watching a book close on an old chapter. A zoom call to settle things felt merely like a pantomime that failed to assign any real relevance to such a large event. At any rate, truth be told, I'd had enough of that over the summer. Afternoon after afternoon of sitting on the sofa, staring at the ceiling and wondering how coming home to an empty home would ever feel normal. I forced myself to observe solitude for many months. I needed to: needed to know I could be alone. Needed time to read the books my counselor told me to. Needed time to process both sides of what happened. Needed time to be okay to accept that there was no going back. Needed time to remember how happy I could be outside of a relationship that was wrong for me, but that I clung to out of fear.
I had spent a long time deciding whether this was what I wanted even after the choice was no longer mine to make. It took a long time to accept that it was happening, and that was hard, too. It's one thing to decide that something is right, but another to follow the steps that make it more and more real. It's hard to step over to the other side of what was once an idea, to the final result, the one that cannot be undone. It's sort of like thinking about having surgery for a while. You know it needs to be done. You accept that. You schedule the appointment. But sitting on the operating table waiting to be put under, you are fearful. There's a realness, a sense that you cannot any longer go back. You know that when you wake up, there is no changing your mind: what's done is done. Deep down though, I knew that this is what I’d wanted for a long, long time. It had actually never even been a question of that, not really. It was a question of whether I was strong enough to come out on the other side of what I needed to do intact. Did I have the strength to follow through? For years I had decided that I didn’t. So I decided it was better to try to be happy in a bad situation than to risk it with the unknown.
Spoilers: the unknown is usually not as bad as we make it out to be. I wish I hadn’t let it scare me the way it had.
That isn’t to say it wasn’t the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve had an overall very fortunate life with some very hard things sprinkled throughout. More than anything, I’m just proud of the strength I’ve cultivated to survive the hard things. Even if to no one but myself, I feel I’ve proven I have what it takes to get through the downs, especially the really, really low ones. Even with that, this almost broke me. There was a time I thought I would never recover. Everything felt grey, my joy evaporated like the water I used to water my plants in the summer. There was pain that hurt my heart so immensely I thought I would sink under it. I don’t know how I made it. But overused as the saying might be, what they say about it being darkest before the dawn is very true. The dark was darker than I’d ever experienced. But even that small sliver of sunrise that came after gave me just enough to hold on.
It was hard, but ever since that day, and now standing on the other side, I've never felt so free. I remember a night about a year and a half back, before COVID, out with friends at the time. They asked how I was doing and over the pounding music, the throngs of people at the bar of our favorite mexican restaurant, I leaned over and said, "I'm so anxious. All the time. I don't know what's wrong with me. Maybe I should see someone? I'm just so unsatisfied, no matter what. I'm always trying to find the next thing to distract me."
I never made any secret of my anxiety to my friends, but truthfully, I struggled with the weight of it more and more as time passed. I really started to wonder about what could be wrong with me. One day as I was taking a shower I realized I'd just woken up with the feeling that I was tiptoeing over glass and it never fully went away. Sometimes, it was a dull ache. Other times, it felt like a shard of it was lodged in my heart, hurting with every beating motion, and I couldn't figure why. I found myself loathing quiet moments to myself, my mind taking them as an opportunity to wonder deeper about why I couldn't avoid the worries growing ever louder in my mind.
I've actually had quite a few friends go through divorce now, especially this year, and I shake my head and wonder if it's really true that young relationships don't last. I don't think that's always the case, but without even realizing, I changed and realized I didn't like the things I thought I did, I wasn't the person I thought I was, my priorities were very different than I had ascertained them to be at 22. Without a guidebook, I felt the parts of me that I wanted to nurture sat in the shadows, unable to realize fully what I wanted to be. What was harder still was perhaps having an idea of what those parts of me could have been, had I chosen differently.
Do I regret how things happened? A little. I wish I had been a better communicator. I wish it had been a cleaner break. I wish I hadn't waited so long, hadn’t changed my mind the first time. I had sat on the steps outside my apartment, largely quiet as my mom spoke on the other side, years ago, back when I was a new bride and had been sideswiped by the drinking episodes. "Ask for an annulment," she'd urged me. "You didn't know about this before. That's grounds for an annulment." I did look into it. In the state I was in, it was hard to get one, hard to prove. People online said your request would get denied. But part of me held me back from searching deeper. I even applied for my physical therapy license in Florida, knowing that if I didn't make some monumental point of leaving, I might never be able to extricate myself. But when it came time to take the Jurisprudence test, I never followed through, letting the link to sign up sit untouched in my inbox.
All of this taught me a few things.
I've learned that letting yourself truly and deeply suffer to spare someone's feelings is almost never worth it, no matter how noble you might be trying to be. The suffering has to have somewhere to go, and inevitably it falls back to both parties.
I've learned that being alone isn't half as bad as being with someone not right for you. It might not feel okay at first, but I promise you, it gets better. Hobbies, trips, friends, counseling will save you. It doesn’t get better all at once, but little by little.
I've learned that anxiety can be a manifestation of buried feelings, of grief, and a sign that you should listen to. If you’re uncomfortable in the quiet of your mind, you need to lean closer. Ask why. It’s uncomfortable. You may not even like the answers. But it never gets better if you don’t.
There was a time just a little over 8 years ago now; a September night I’d finished a gig. It was my senior year of college, and Jordan came up for the weekend to DJ a gig in downtown Macon. We were going through one of our phases of talking, and it was bad. It wasn’t actually bad. But I’d realized a few weeks earlier again that I still had the same feelings I’d always had for him. I still felt the immense pull I inevitably always did to talk to him, and sitting next to him always felt like there was a magnet drawing us closer. It was bad because I was aware of how much I loved him, despite trying to push those feelings aside, but I was still in a relationship I felt I couldn’t get out of. The situation felt doomed once more to spiral out of control until I shut it down out of fear and the feeling of hitting a wall in being unable to do anything about it.
That night, I lied. I told my boyfriend I’d be working at a gig late, but I went to watch Jordan at his show instead. I guess you could say I first realized I had really strong feelings for him the first weekend we ever spent time together a few years before when I watched him play a show. Even back then, when he looked up at me, it felt like I was the only one in the room he was playing to. It felt the same way that night. He looked up at me and smiled, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away as I smiled back. I lost myself in that moment, until a girl came over, drink in hand. She tapped her foot to the music for a while, and then turned to me. “Is that your boyfriend?” She asked.
“Oh…” I said, caught off guard. My cheeks turned pink. “…no.”
“Oh,” she said. “It’s just, the way you were looking at him. It looks like he’s your boyfriend.”
He finished his set, and we mingled for a while outside until it got late. One of us suggested we take a walk through downtown. We turned the corner, and as our hands brushed we grabbed each other, walking hand in hand down the street. It was such a simple thing. I’d held hands with him before, in private. But I’ve never forgotten how it felt, that outward show of my feelings, holding hands as people passed us and wondering how we looked to them: like we were together. We sat on a park bench holding each other as long as we could until I had to go home, unable to make excuses for how late I was out any longer.
Eventually I grew tired of those goodbyes. Watching the clock. Never having enough time.
In that quiet of the morning a year ago as I contemplated what to write, I realized this had never been a story about my ex husband and I at all, but rather a story about finally trusting myself enough to take the leap of faith to be with Jordan, a contemplation always riddled with self doubt for me. Even before we dated I second guessed myself with him.
“What if we give dating a try and it doesn’t work out after all? What will that mean after years of believing we should have been together?”
“We’re really different, we’ll argue all the time.”
“What if you get tired of me?”
You spend long enough losing at relationships that you get jaded. And yet, for all of my years of doubts and talking myself out of it, they never did come true. It’s been a full year now, and I still spend large portions of the day wondering if my life is real. How could I still be so happy? How could I still get butterflies every time I see him? How could I have lived so many years saying goodbye over and over again to the one person that I’ve never been able to be without?
I’d written to him, just as COVID was starting to get bad.
"I only want to be true to myself... accept these feelings in my heart, make peace with them. Letting myself have the space to feel makes me feel free, in a circumstantial way, through having the peace to know simply that it's okay to be. I close my eyes and exhale, allowing those feelings the space to exist. They live in a garden in my mind, and in so many rooms in my heart. Just this one small connection of writing to tell you this is a solace, this connection one I treasure always."
Yes, if I could have changed things, I would have listened to myself sooner, instead of spending so long bargaining with myself, convincing myself that eventually things would be better when I learned how to quell my feelings and be more devoted.
But I’m so proud of breaking the cycle. I have never felt one iota of self doubt in this year. I wake up and I’m at peace. It was long overdue.
Recovering from divorce is hard. Some view it as a mark against you: a thing to be judged by. A failure. As a child of divorce, I remember growing up being very resolved that I would never get one. That was my life goal: have a relationship that lasted forever. I may have grown up in a broken family, but my own family wouldn’t be. I’d make it so. I believe I fought the concept for a long time in part because of this. But as you get older, things aren’t as black and white as you think they are growing up. I realized that just because you might still be together doesn’t mean things aren’t broken. In fact, sometimes staying in something that isn’t right is the thing that makes you broken, each of you chipping away at each other until there’s less and less of both of you to give. Sometimes, you come around the circle far enough to realize, sickly, that you were broken before you ever entered that relationship. That your past perhaps made you more prone to choose things that weren’t good for you.
Perhaps I’m only putting a positive spin on it because I lived through it and I’m trying to be kind to myself. But if you’re going through it or you’ve been through it before, there is strength to be found through it. You’ve experienced the splintering of your entire life, lost friends, belongings, perhaps lost a home… and you’ve come out on the other side. Get the counseling, if you haven’t. It’s worth it if you can. If your counselor isn’t helping, find another.
And don’t let it harden you. Stay soft. I think the strongest people remember that that’s where true strength lies: in our ability to not let our hurts accumulate into chips on our back, but scars that we let others see to show them that we were strong enough to survive them.
Now I’m one year into the best year of my life. I’m excited to see where it goes from here.
