I didn’t set any goals for 2020. I was lost from the very beginning. I went to a goal-writing yoga workshop a year ago January … and left without any meaningful plan, just a lot of emotions and some tentative sparks.
The only thing that started to crystallize: I need to fix my marriage. There, in the dark of the yoga studio, hearing only the sound of my breath, I admitted what I had been afraid to say out loud. My marriage needed to be “fixed.”
I debated what that would look like. How to actually make it work. (It’s not like we hadn’t tried already, many times before.) I settled on a surprise trip for the two of us to Mexico. For June. It was January … and the earliest I was willing to fix my marriage was June.
In this case, hindsight is absolutely 2020.
Then, coronavirus. An “unprecedented” global pandemic. Turns out it was a good year not to have any tangible goals because 2020 didn’t follow a trajectory or a plan. It just leapt manically from crisis to crisis.
And yet. 2020 … the fucked-up year that brought me back to myself despite my best efforts to the contrary.
Now it’s a year later. January 2021. I haven’t written a blog post in months but I finally, finally have words to say.
In 2020, I “fixed” my marriage. By finally finding the courage to end it.
It has been broken for a long time, and all we’ve been doing now for months on top of years is pretending — and hurting each other in the process.
Getting to the point where I could say it out loud didn’t happen overnight. Far from it. I had no idea where to go … so I tried all the wrong things before finally being ready to trust my intuition.
During the early days of quarantine, we spent all our time together. More than we had ever spent together in our entire marriage. Endless conversations. Working on top of each other in our cramped house, remote learning one child and barely keeping the other one in check. Never out of earshot, hardly out of reach. I was numb inside but I convinced myself we were happy. Trapped at home, with no one but our little family, I lied and told myself it was enough.
But when the world started to open back up over the summer, I was gone again. In a heartbeat. I couldn’t stay there a minute longer.
And that’s where I ended up in my head at the end of the year: I couldn’t stay a minute longer. Pretending. Lying. Married.
On our wedding anniversary, I woke up early and texted a friend what I knew with sudden, blinding certainty: “Today is our 13th wedding anniversary and I do not want be married for the 14th.”
“Does he know?” she texted back.
“No.”
It was time. I needed to do hard things.
The process of dissolving any marriage is messy, and the details aren’t mine alone to share. But there are so many emotions associated with divorce. I feel them all. Disbelief. Guilt. Fear. Anger. Sadness. Uncertainty. The uncertainty gets me most of all. It’s a rollercoaster on a constant basis – up and down and crying and laughing and freaking the fuck out about what comes next.
But underneath all of those hard things, there’s something else too: Relief. I’ve spent years being stuck. I’m not stuck anymore.
There are still hard things ahead: Telling the kids. Splitting up the household and forming new ones, separately. Selling the house. Figuring out exactly what effective co-parenting looks like.
I’m scared as hell about those make-or-break-me moments that lie ahead … but I don’t have doubt. That’s how I know this is the right decision. Instead of staying numb, I’m feeling all of the feelings for the first time in years, and doubt isn’t one of them.
Because at its core, 2020 was not a year defined by fixing (or breaking) my marriage. It was a year about learning how to trust myself. Our failing marriage was only a symptom of a bigger problem.
Instead of fixing my marriage this past year, I fixed my own mindset – and everything is falling into place at last.
This year, I’ve learned …
… my happiness has to come first. I am not okay with my boys growing up thinking this is what a marriage should look like. They need to see that I deserve to be happy and I am willing to fight through the hard things to make that a reality.
… I am strong enough to change the things that aren’t working anymore. My marriage ended years ago, but I stayed because it was easier to stay. It was comfortable, though unhappy. And I let myself be numb instead of believing I was strong enough to leave.
… I don’t need to crowdsource my dilemmas. I need support but not approval. I know what I want, and I can move forward with those decisions even if the people who love me don’t always agree.
2020 was a year when a lot of things broke. But if you’re reading this, you didn’t. You didn’t break, and neither did I. Even when everything around me feels like it’s burning to the ground, I am still here – and I keep going. Forward.
So, 2021. A new year ahead. I’m not setting any arbitrary goals this year either. I’m going to take it day by day and moment by moment, because anything else feels impossible right now. But day by day and moment by moment, I’ll get through.
If you’re navigating hard things this year, you’re not alone. Trust that there will be happiness on the other side. On this too, I don’t have any doubt.
The Short List: Essentials for Surviving Divorce
If you are contemplating or navigating divorce too, first, I’m sorry. It sucks, no matter how you got here, where you are in the process, or whether you have all the best reasons in the word. It’s still hard. Here’s my short list of divorce essentials that are helping me hold it together as I navigate what comes next.
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- Good friends to listen. The single thing that has gotten me here today is a solid group of friends who have listened tirelessly as I worked through the emotions, cried, laughed, panicked, got mad. They are always there, phone on, door open (mask on), all hours of the day and night. Divorce is lonely as hell … but with friends like mine, I am never alone.
- Good alcohol for when you just don’t want to talk anymore. You will get to a point where you simply can’t rehash the latest in the saga that’s your life. Every time you do, you relive it a little, and sometimes you need to just.stop.thinking.— about the past or the future.
- A therapist for a neutral perspective. Navigating divorce and feeling all the emotions is a lot to process on your own, and even your closest friends can’t listen all the time. A periodic check-in with a professional lets you question, vent, and draw your own conclusions in your own way on your own time. There’s freedom to be found when you’re ready.
- A copy of Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. Whatever hard thing you’re facing, there is truth in Untamed to remind you why you keep going forward. It sounds silly but I’ve reread parts of it three times recently, whenever I need to remember what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.
- A safe space or spaces you can go when you just can’t be home. I drive at night more than I ever have before, and I find myself on my yoga mat at the end of hard days, because there’s quiet in my head to be found there.
- Music so relevant you listen on repeat. I alternate Taylor Swift’s ‘evermore’ with The Chicks’ ‘Gaslighter’. The lyrics cut right through me but it’s cathartic to turn it up loud and sing. Put ‘evermore’ on headphones as you fall asleep if you want to get chills.
- Whatever it takes to sleep. The process of divorce is emotionally exhausting to say the least, but it’s often hard to sleep at night, to turn my head off from the carousel of worries. Figure out what you need to get real sleep, and use it: lavender essential oil, melatonin, a short-term prescription. You can’t do hard things on no sleep. Period, end of story. It all starts with sleep.
I’m focusing on myself a lot more these days so I’ve been less present … but I’m still here. Don’t be a stranger. And I won’t either. I’ll continue to chronicle this journey because it’s important for me to process, and for other people to read. No one should stay stuck like I was. And no one should feel alone through the hard things. XOXO 💜 Always.
