By the Way, I Forgive You...

“Over the past years of getting to a healthier place, it’s been important for me to get rid of my really finite standard of normalcy and understand that maybe the bad and ugly things are part of me, but I don’t have to submit to them. And that the existence of anxiety or depression does not negate my own capacity for joy, or my intelligence.”
-Julien Baker


I so desperately want to write, truly write, what it is to grieve something that you miss less and less with each passing day.
-Me, in my journal, yesterday

Gracious. I have worked this particular post out more times than I can count. The words never quite catch the way I want them to.

I’m coming to this understanding, as I wind my way through this process, that the person that I haven’t forgiven is that girl that I was about 4 years ago. The girl that was trying so hard to hold everything in life together, the girl that missed a million red flags waving right in her face-I have a lot of anger at her.

She messed my life up, you know. There are so, so many days that I wish I could grab hold of her and say please, for the love of all that is holy, stop.

The thing is, I love my life. I have found a place of contentment that I never knew before, and I can’t say why that is-it may be that earning my own paycheck gives me a sense of control over my finances that I didn’t have before, it might be that my relationship with my girls is so much stronger since we spend so much time together just as the three of us, it might be that I have a belief in my own abilities that I just didn’t have before. Maybe it’s all of that. I don’t know. What I do know, what I want every last one of these blog posts to make clear is this: my divorce was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Now, I get it if it seems like, then why write all these posts at all, Joy?

Mostly, the answer to that is that it’s taken a good long minute to get here. It’s taken a lot of healing and a lot of growth and a lot of looking around me at my girls and my family and my friends and coming to grips with the idea that I like this version of me.

And coming to grips with the idea that I have to forgive that girl that I was for getting me into this mess. Because, jeesh, as hard and long and drawn out as all of this has seemed, the reward has been great.

It’s all going to be all right in the end.

"Emptiness is just a lesson in canvases.”
-Julien Baker, Appointments