It's time to pivot.
This blog has been my solace, my voice, my hope in a sea of grief and loss and abandon. It's no secret that the end of my marriage was beyond the most difficult period of my life. The complete tailspin of grief that came after- this blog has become a record of that. Reading back through some of the posts from the first year after the divorce is painful to me now, knowing how hard that girl I was then was trying to hold it together and be positive in the face of this obstacle that seemed the size of a mountain.
January 14, 2016:
I wish I had some sense of direction, some sense of what the heck I'm doing. Trying to convince myself that this won't always feel so heavy and all-encompassing. It's hard to imagine how this ends.
There remain bits of my divorce that I don't talk about on the blog. There are pieces of my grief that lie only with my sister and my therapist, and there are huge chunks of this process that remain on pieces of paper that only exist for my eyes, and perhaps one day for the girls.
February 2, 2016 (the day before my divorce was final):
Please let this be a beginning-a good beginning. A hope, a peace. I pray that for you, dear Joy. I pray for good to come, amazing things you never even knew you wanted or needed. And that you read these words with a smile at the joy you realize only with hindsight that you are about to experience.
My children watched me fall apart. I rocked their already shaken world to the core. It breaks my heart. I can't take it back, I can't do anything other than heal. I hope that I have shown them that as sad and broken as I was, I have managed to grow and learn and create this new life for us.
I know that grief doesn't actually end. It shifts and morphs and becomes a part of who you are and what you present to the world.
April 13, 2017:
Life is so much bigger than me and my melodrama that only lives in my head. And yet, and yet, and yet...whenever I hear bad things, this is where I go. This is the hub around which all of my understanding of pain swirls.
That will forever be true.
It will also forever be true that I am grateful to be divorced. There was a time when that wasn't true, when I honestly believed that I was never going to genuinely feel happy again-when I believed to my soul that there would always be this hole in my heart that no amount of tears or anger or smashing dishes (at the suggestion of my therapist) would ever be able to heal.
But heal it has.
I'm not saying that I'm completely cured by any means. But I do know that I'm at a place where it no longer pains me to say that I'm divorced. Bit by bit I have released that feeling of shame that I carry over allowing my marriage to end.
January 16, 2018:
Life is so much better than it ever was. That's a blessing, Joy...if you had planted your feet and refused to move, none of these blessings would have been able to move.
And so, we pivot. We have indeed reached the bend in the road. The grief is still there, wound inside my bones and blood, as real as anything I've experienced. But it's purpose has shifted.
There are pieces of me lying inside of all I have written, seen and unseen. My goal moving forward is to embrace all of this joy for what it is. I want to continue to write my truth, but from this new perspective. From a heart changed and shifted, from a hope I honestly thought I might never hold again.
This new bend is scary and unknown and glorious.
"So this is what the truth feels like
This is more of what I had in mind"
-Gwen Stefani
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