Grim, Effective

I depart for Family Court fortified for battle.

I’m on track to be forty minutes early, enough time to watch previous proceedings and feel comfortable with the judge. I’m neatly dressed and having a great hair day. I put on the boots that make me feel like a futuristic crime fighter and give me a Beyonce level confidence. I got out of bed an hour early to apply a full face of waterproof makeup. I have tissues and panic attack medicine in my purse.

As I’m stepping onto the bus I double-check the letter I received, curse, and get back off.

Our divorce hearing is the following week.

* * *

I never expected email would provide such an emotional gut-punch.

I was searching for an confirmation that I cancelled our honeymoon bookings (we would have departed yesterday, a point I remembered today when I’m reminded that I didn’t cancel our Tokyo hotel) when I stumble across something my ex-husband wrote and sent to me.

Thanks, Google.

It’s a post from a blog he wrote for a little while as a way (I think) of helping him process his autism diagnosis. He wrote privately, but would send me things from time to time that he thought I would like.

The post is everything I loved about him . . . It’s thoughtful and smart, nerdy and a little self-deprecating.

It’s also completely shattering.

* * *

Divorce is the most interminable process imaginable.

I was so optimistic at the beginning of our process. Devastated, yes, but I believed that we could get it done quickly. We didn’t have joint assets aside from a savings account and didn’t have any actual kids. Since we didn’t have anything to fight over we could get it wrapped by my birthday! I could start 34 with a new name and a clean slate.

That optimism was a little misplaced.

* * *

The ex-husband left me five months ago.

It feels like 500 years. Things have slowly gotten better, the way everyone said they would. I’ve lost 10+ pounds and kept it off. I sleep better and am more active. I drink less and eat healthier. My tri time was two minutes faster. I’m not longer sushed or told that my feelings are too much or too intense. My life is better in measurable ways.

In the back of my daily journal, I keep a list of things I hated about my ex. Not “oh, that was annoying” but the big, talk-these-out-in-couples-therapy kind of things. It’s part of how I’ve coped over the past five months.

It’s been grim, but effective.

Which is why the piece of writing he sent me affects me so badly.

Right above that list of things I hated was a list I made early in our marriage, when I was still trying to figure out what living together as a married couple meant. I could pull it out and read it and think about how lucky I was to have him in my life.


The piece of writing I unearth in my email is like that list of positives about the ex. It’s a relic of the person my ex could be and the person (I think) he wanted to be. It was him when he was ready for adventure and love and commitment, before those ideas became . . . whatever they became to him right before he left.


Coming across that person unexpectedly, especially days before our divorce will be finalized, provokes such a deep sense of loss that it nearly knocks the breath out of me. It’s a startling, and half-unwelcome reminder that despite all the fortifications and grim, effective lists and desire to dear god, just get this over with already there’s a part of me that is still mourning our relationship and the man he used to be.

It's Complicated

It’s a request for new music that brings people out of the woodwork.

My husband was never interested in music. No, it was more than that. I don’t think he actually liked music. He would buy tracks here and there that he had heard in movies or television or video games, but he rarely bought whole albums and I wasn't supposed to listen to music in the house without headphones because it was too stimulating.

I am somewhat on the opposite side of the spectrum.

I take opportunities to see shows live whenever I can. Big, expensive shows at arenas, tiny jazz shows in clubs that you could barely move around in, someone’s aunt’s second-cousin’s cover band at a bar in the suburbs. I have playlists curated by mood, by activity, by person. I took hours to make the husband a playlist that introduced him to all of my favorite bands and tried to tell him how I felt about him. Very high school, I know, but it meant something to me.

He never listened to it.

For weeks after he moved out I couldn’t listen to anything. I was raw enough that any music just hurt. After I moved out of our apartment and took a deep breath and realized this is actually happening I plugged in my headphones and turned on some old favorites.

I couldn’t listen to them. Any of them.

I wasn't stupid. I avoided all the Motown we used for dance parties. I didn’t touch any of the pop songs we played at our wedding. I skipped tracks that were happy or about falling for someone.

It didn’t help.

When I turned on For Emma, Forever Ago all I could think about was how much he hated Bon Iver and would ask me to turn it off. Robyn’s Body Talk was playing the last time we had an argument about one of the big things going wrong in our marriage. Even the Miles Davis and John Coltrane I used to listen to when I was falling asleep reminded me of meeting him and falling in love. There was no catharsis in any of it.

I did what any reasonable person would do. I asked my social media channels for recommendations, saying that a lot of music I loved was now associated with my ex and I needed something new.

That word. Ex. It blew up my entire life. Again.

I haven’t been HEY WORLD I’M GETTING A DIVORCE, but I haven’t exactly been silent about it either. I changed my last name. I posted about getting a new apartment, about moving, about living alone, for Christ’s sake. I’ve wrote and posted about sadness and heartbreak as it was happening.

But as soon as I posted the word ex the entire world messages me.

* * *

I was unprepared for a lot of things about getting divorced: the sudden, intense return of my sex drive, the discovery that I don’t know how to make friends aside from awkwardly blurting out “You’re cool and I want to be friends with you,” the return of surprise, awful panic attacks all catch me unaware.

What I am most unprepared for is the people who want me to perform my grief for them.

People I haven’t spoken to in decades are suddenly calling, texting, messaging with versions of the same thing. “OhhhhhhhhmyyyyyGawwwwwwwwwwwwd. I’m so sorry! What happened?”

There are people I am genuinely glad to hear from. I get a card from an old roommate saying she’s thinking about me and hopes the next year will be better for me. A friend I haven’t seen in months comes over and watches Peaky Blinders with me so I don’t have to be alone. Another person who generally isn’t into being physically affectionate holds my hand and lets me sit with my head on her shoulder for awhile because she knows how alone I feel.

The people I’m glad to hear from are the ones who don’t ask anything of me. They don’t offer lame “I’m here to help if you need it.” They bring food when they notice I’ve lost 10 pounds in two weeks. They drag me out of the house to go walk and pet their dogs. They hand over their babies for me snuggle while they unpack my boxes. They don’t ask for details about what happened.

I am amazed by the number of people who do ask for details, or who offer their own opinions about what happened. Oh, was your anxiety too much for him? Did you catch him with someone else? Did a demon secretly take over his soul during a failed exorcism and now you have to return to the faith of your youth to escape?

What I want to say is that I was trained by Ra’s al Ghul to secretly infiltrate a gang of 40-something male Trekkies. My goal was to seduce and destroy them one by one, but I realized that the poison given to me by the League of Assassins turned out to be a sugar pill, a ploy for a larger conspiracy which I wanted no part of. Now I sharpen my blade and wait for death to come.

Instead I tell them what I tell everyone.

“It’s complicated.”

* * *

Grief is so personal and complicated and I want, so much, to talk about it. I want to tell someone about how waiting for my divorce papers induced a panic attack, how getting coffee with my ex-in-laws felt like a birthday party and a funeral all at once, how I met a man recently who made a bell in my chest ring. I need to talk about how I still don’t understand why my husband doesn’t love me anymore and how I’m getting to a point where I don’t need to understand.

This is not the grief people want.

They want me to go through motions, to perform grief that will give them some sort of catharsis. They want to hear something horrible about one or both of us so they can say “That could never happen in my marriage.” They want me to set his things on fire or tell them that I can’t live another day if we don’t reconcile. That kind of a narrative is reassuring.

And that narrative isn't true. At least, it’s not always true.

I have days where I feel great.

I wake up and get dressed and feel beautiful. I go to work and feel happy and fulfilled and like I’m making a real difference in the world. I spend time with friends talking about comics or music or the role of coded eroticism in 19th century novels and I feel funny and smart and interesting. I feel like I might be romantically valuable to someone else. Of course I am! People I love have shown me many times.

I have days where I feel like a piece of garbage someone has thrown away.

I wake up and get dressed and feel dumpy. I go to work and write shitty first drafts all day. I spend time watching trash television just so I don’t have to think about what a disgusting pile of crap I am. I feel like I’ll never be romantically valuable to someone else. How could I be? Someone I loved already showed me I’m not.

There’s no catharsis in any of it.

Blushy

A few weeks ago I went back and reread our wedding vows.

It was a dumb idea, but I was looking for . . . something. Some indication of what was about to come, some hint that I loved my husband more than he loved me, some inkling that he was lying when he promised to hang on with me through the hard stuff.

It was counterproductive. I knew that even as I was searching through my documents for the final copy. There was no way I could learn anything new about the person I had been with for years by staring at something we built in our best, most optimistic place.

I thought divorce and therapy and ruminating on the people we were would help me discover something new about what happened to us. It didn’t. It just confirmed what I already knew.

He wasn’t the person I needed him to be.

* * *

I had two goals for myself when my husband moved out.

Of course I did. I had a new five-year plan the week after he left. I’m a grant-writer. My religion is measurable outcomes and SMART goals.

The first was relatively simple. Be an adult. Treat the husband with kindness where I could and respect where I couldn’t. Avoiding airing dirty laundry to mutual friends or family. Provide prompt replies to requests for information. As much as you may want to, don’t smash or steal any of his stuff (leaving the special edition blu-ray of the original Alien trilogy behind was my greatest test).

That part has been easy enough. (He may have other feelings about this, who knows). I’m still on good terms with his family. When people ask “What happened?!” I say that it was complicated and I’d rather not talk about it. I apply the “is it true, is it kind, is it necessary” test to everything I say outside of my shrink’s office. He still owns the Alien trilogy.

I’m not perfect. I have days where I fantasize about smashing all of his shit with a baseball bat or breaking back into the apartment and erasing all of his saved Breath of the Wild data. I left Alien but I took Silence of the Lambs.

I’m trying.

* * *

I have a crush on someone.

Of all of the things I expected to happen after the husband and I separated, this was absolutely not one of them. Having to hide my cell phone from myself so I don’t text an “I miss you?” Yup, sounds about right. Not being able to sleep because I’m up armchair psychologizing about what went wrong. Duh. Crying uncontrollably while organizing my spice rack? Unexpected, but not out of the realm of possibility.

But an actual, stomach-swoopy, blushy, can’t-make-eye-contact, feel like a sixteen year old crush?

Jesus. What kind of a person am I? I don’t even have my divorce papers yet and I’m already feeling like a dumb kid, mooning over someone else. Am I incapable of being alone for two months without immediately looking for someone new?

This isn’t the person I wanted to be.

* * *

The second goal was to come through the divorce with an open, warm, and trusting heart.

I’ve lived my life as a pretty warm and open-hearted person. Not necessarily as a result of trying, but because that’s just the kind of personality I was lucky enough to get. It’s something I really like about myself and wanted to be the retain in the midst of a shitstorm of anger, despair, and bitterness.

It’s hard because it’s not really the kind of thing I can gauge in the moment. It’s easy to look at my actions and say: “I didn’t smash my husband’s signed-by-George-Takei-Enterprise-Model on the way out the door. Well done.” In the midst of the previously mentioned shitstorm of emotions it’s harder to say “I’m as accepting, warm, and loving as I was four years ago.”

The best measurement I’ve come up with so far is looking at how I’m treating myself. I’m pretty fucking hard on myself, so can I just calm the fuck down and see a stupid, stomach-swoopy, blushy crush as just that, and not some kind of a reflection on my character?

Because all that stuff, the ruminating and therapy and inappropriately-timed-crushes can show me what I was hoping to find in my wedding vows; what I’m hoping for from the goals I set for myself during this whole miserable process.

I can be the person I need myself to be.

Tidy

A year ago I was the happiest I had ever been. I was looking forward to our third anniversary as a couple and our first wedding anniversary. I was as in love as I was the first weeks we were together.

Half a year ago, the husband and I were working on some stuff. Maybe our first year together hadn’t been perfect, but I had never expected it to be. We were two people who were used to being independent, and it takes awhile to get used to a major life change. And none of that mattered, because we had the rest of our lives together to get it right.

(I now see where this is going, too)

Two months ago my husband asked me for a divorce.

My break-ups always followed more or less the same format: bourbon, sad music, crying, bitching, and about two weeks later moving on. It’s worked for every break-up from my high school boyfriend (minus the bourbon) to finding out my ex asked another woman to marry him while we were still together. I sympathized with friends going through wrenching splits, but always assumed that I was impervious. I was resilient. I had the perfect formula.

Yeah, no.

I thought I knew how to handle a break-up.

* * *

I’m standing in the kitchen of my apartment, washing the dishes and sobbing so loudly I’m certain my neighbors can hear me. It’s not the first time it’s happened in recent weeks, but it’s a new set of neighbors and I feel like I should give a damn.

I feel like I should. I don’t

I just keep washing the dishes and crying. When the dishes are done, I move onto dusting and crying. And on to sweeping and crying. And on to alphabetizing the spice rack and crying. I keep up with the doing-chores-and-crying thing until it’s time for-going-to-bed-and-crying. I don’t pour myself a drink. I don’t put on The Cure. I don’t call anyone to bitch.

I cry.

I do things that feel like forward motion.

I thought I knew how to handle moving on.

* * *

The truth is that any real grieving I’ve done has been decades ago, when childhood or the simple self-absorption of my 20s was enough to take the edge off. Sure, I’ve split with people since then, but I haven’t lost someone.

So I go into heavy-research mode. I read everything I can get my hands on about psychology and divorce and grief. I talk to my friends who have gone through the same thing about what to expect. I strategize with my therapist about empowerment. I mark days on the calendar and congratulate myself when I get to the point where grief turns a magical corner and you stop crying in public.

I cry on the bus the same day.

I start to track my moods on a daily basis. I see my friends. I throw myself into triathlon training and meditation. I go for long hikes. I switch to a primarily plant-based diet. I start practicing lock-picking and knot-tying. I get serious about paying off consumer debt and saving for a house.

I cry while having dinner with my best friend.

I make one-year, five-year, and ten-year plans—I’ve never had a problem that couldn’t be addressed by a good five-year plan! I wait for that moment of insight that’s part of every public radio piece—the moment when I realize this is when I’ll become a mountain-climber, write the Great American Novel, take a trip to Tibet and become the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

I cry in my one-to-one meeting with my boss.

I thought I knew how to handle grief.

* * *

A year ago I was the happiest I’d ever been.

I’d never met a problem I couldn’t fix. I’d throw hours of intense study, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and a good diet at my life. It wasn’t always perfect, but I had a lot of confidence life could at least be tidily organized.

My life has suddenly been dumped out of its neat boxes and I don’t even know how to start organizing. I want, so badly, to be able to fix this, to find a way to clean up this mess. Beyond the messiness of my marriage ending (and ohboy, is that a mess), everything I’ve relied on for years—exercise and a support system and research-backed therapy—isn’t helping me put anything back where it’s supposed to be. There’s no faster tri time, no Great American Novel, no spiritual insight.

I thought I knew how to handle a break-up, how to handle moving on, how to handle grief.

Turns out I don’t know a goddamn thing.