"To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love."
- Vietnamese Zen master, Thich Nhat Hahn
We are nearly to the end.
I don't really mean that, of course. The end will never actually come, the end will become a new beginning before I've even realized that that an ending came to pass.
But that's a bit out there.
What I mean is that we are nearly to the end of the year of letting go.
One of the best parts of being born on Christmas day is that you get to become a new age just as the old year fades away, and the new year becomes a time to focus on the future.
For the past two years I have somehow found that giving a name to the year ahead of me gives it some purpose. Calling 2016 "the year of transition" made me feel like I was actually accomplishing something besides just wallowing in grief. If you have read my posts from that year, you know that I really wasn't doing much more than that-but calling it a transition allowed me to feel free of expectations that I get it together and move past the end of my marriage.
My divorce is the prism through which everything gets filtered.
So, what does it mean to be to the end of letting go?
I physically have let go of so much this past year. The more things that I purge, the more layers peel away, and my soul feels lighter and lighter. I am breaking a cycle inside of myself of hoarding not only so much stuff, but so many emotions I could drown in them. Writing down all of this grief has been such an outlet-I would likely still be unable to get up out of bed without it.
And so, as that particular chapter is coming to at least something of a close, I am looking forward to my new year, my next adventure in this tiny little life that I lead.
I'm thinking that I'm going to call it the year of peace. I am so blessedly at peace right now it barely seems real. There was a time when I was most certain that I was never going to feel peace ever again. When I was sure that all of my best memories lay behind me, memories that lay inside of such young adoration and babies and a struggle to make life out of very little money but such love.
I had a small moment of clarity, in the time between when Nick told me that he was leaving and when he actually left, when I was immobile and scared beyond anything that I had ever felt before and completely sure that I was trapped inside of a nightmare-and in that one tiny moment of clarity, I felt like everything would be okay, and that this horrific moment in my life was going to lead me to a place that I had only ever dreamed of, a place where I was at peace.
I've said that the final two years of my marriage were unhealthy. But on the surface, everything was fine. There were days on end where everything was just fine, where I was certain that I was inventing the distance that I felt creeping into my marriage. It was like dancing on a knife's edge, everything perfect until the slightest turn undid it all. I would tell myself that I was such an ungrateful wife, imagining that things were off kilter when they were clearly fine.
Obviously, the lesson to be learned here is to trust your gut.
And yes, I have now have trust issues that go deep.
But my point is, I have a peace to my soul now that I simply have not had for a very long time. An understanding that I am in charge of my life from here on out, a firm grasp on the idea that being assertive does not mean that I am pushing my own demands onto other people, but rather that I am standing up for my own thoughts and feelings, giving weight to my own opinions. I still would rather listen, I still would rather hear why you think a certain thought and understand where you are coming from, than offer up my own opinion (my family will find that to be an untrue sentence, but everyone else will understand it)- the point is, I can offer them now, I know to my bones who I am and what I think.
So, for today anyway, I am at peace. This restless soul has found purchase that has always eluded her. And I know that somehow I found a way to communicate that to that lost, lonely girl who only wanted her life back.
I told her that the life ahead would be bliss. And so it has.
Love is: I gave you everything I had to give.
-The Lover Speaks
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