I’m baaaaack–bitches!

I can just see it now. My grandparents are all collectively rolling in their graves. I just swore in the title of this inaugural post.

But I am back, and it calls for celebration. Where am I returning from? Well, that’s an interesting question.  I can answer it metaphorically, and I can answer it literally. I’ll start with the literal.

For almost two years, I wrote a weekly column for the Houston Chronicle’s Gray Matters blog. The column was called Split Happens. You can find the posts archived here. It chronicled my journey through my separation from my ex-husband and ended when the divorce was final and I’d been out of the marriage for two years. Some people were upset that I ended the column. At the time, I had mixed feelings.  But it had gone as far as it could go in that incarnation and I couldn’t really figure out a way to keep it going. Even though the headline of the final post read “After the divorce, finally healed, finally whole,” well, I wasn’t.  In some ways, that was just the beginning of my journey.

The journey I needed to take was not one anyone could really accompany me on. It was dark, and, while the tone of many of my Split Happens posts ranges from whimsical to longing to wistful to down right funny, I needed to go deeper.

Basically, I needed to work through some shit, and it was only shit I wanted my therapist to hear. I also was upset by the fact that so many of my male readers thought that after two years, I should be “moving on.” (This will be the subject of a later post, definitely) They defined moving on as being with someone new, when at the two year post-separation mark, I was nowhere near being ready for someone new. I’d already been there. Tried that. To varying degrees of disaster. No, at that point, I needed to get right with myself and figure out what made me who I am. I needed to figure out why I was always drawn to narcissistic partners, why when I thought I had good self esteem that I was behaving as if I had none, why I kept doing things that demonstrated not only a lack of respect for myself but a lack of self-caring.

So I went deep, and I went to that dark place alone. At a certain point, I even had to go there without a therapist. There were days I never thought I’d survive it. I had to confront my codependency and figure out a way not to repeat those patterns. I can’t say that at this point I am necessarily completely healed, either, but I am at a much stronger place. At least emotionally.

Physically, financially and professionally, though, it’s a different story. I always felt like when my ex and I split that the dominoes fell, and that the first thing that fell was my emotional and spiritual health and then my physical health and then my financial health. Artistically, I was on fire then, and that was the only thing that kept me sane. In fact, I think if I hadn’t had the column, I might have even been worse. But eventually, the emotional toil made its impact in other ways.

For one, the business that I’d been nurturing since 2011 pretty much tanked. Since I was not functional for about two months after the split, I lost many of my clients and lost credibility. It is one of the deepest regrets that I have that I didn’t just put everything on hold and take a month or two completely off rather than try to work through that time. And yet, financially I had to work. There really wasn’t any way around it.

I lost 45 pounds in two months immediately post-separation because I did not eat for most of that time. People were telling me how great I looked, and I suppose in many ways I did look good, because I had the weight to lose, but my body was basically shutting down. I was not eating; I was not sleeping. At one point, I had to be prescribed medication to force me to sleep, or be hospitalized.

Eventually, of course, I made my way back. I gained back weight — and now need to work on getting it off again — and began eating more normally. I started working out with a trainer and then when I couldn’t afford to continue tried to keep going on my own, with some success. I started sleeping through the night again.

But my business never really recovered. It’s one of the most devastating parts of the divorce, and the part that stings the most is that it was my response to the event. I can’t blame my ex. But it stings, and it also stings that I’m struggling so much financially because I have just never been able to recover.

Some women write about how transformative divorce is and how empowering. It is. Particularly if you’ve been with an abusive partner. But the part most people don’t tell you about is that the climb back is long and slow, and filled with setbacks. There is no triumphant stand-on-the-mountaintop moment for most of us. For most of us, it’s just “good, this month I was able to make my mortgage payment” or “this month I was able to pay the rent.”

So since I stopped writing my column, life’s been hard and not a lot of fun, but it’s also been mine. Even though there are still days I’m terrified I’m going to end up under a bridge, there are other days when I feel unbelievably light and even giddy. Those days are more and more often, and the anxious days, the sad days are much fewer.  What I notice about the sad days now is that they’re not really about the divorce or the fact that I am divorced, they’re more about something I witnessed or something I read about in the news, or my aging cat, Cougar. I’m not sad about my ex anymore. In fact, I wish him well. It would make me happy to see him in a healthy, normal romantic relationship. So I guess you could say that I’m over him.

I may not be over the damage he’s caused, and I may never be able to trust anyone again, but I’m over him.

And that, indeed, is progress.