The Divorce Chronicles: How to divorce with decorum
Those cliche sayings: “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone” or “Be careful what you wish for”. Irony in its best form, isn’t it? People pitying you, time teasing you and the universe unleashing utter self-reflection upon your every fibre. When do you know you have made the right decision or will this feeling or regret haunt you?
Honestly, I am not sure if I ever knew to what extent this process would test my furthest boundaries of inner strength and sheer determination of survival. It doesn’t help when those around me keep reminding me “but this is what you wanted, isn’t it?” To a degree, yes. I never thought I fully got to test myself as an individual, as an adult woman. I went from one comfort zone to another and the lessons in between were perhaps not loud enough to have fulfilled my thirst for growth. Perhaps I didn’t exactly know what growth meant.
Right now, at this point in life I don’t really have an option but to move forward, alone. At one point I did want this, some would say I manifested while others would say I actively searched for it and created it. Regardless of how it came about, the truth is I have to accept it happened and let go. Let go of what ifs and whys and most importantly the self-hatred.
Attempting to keep it together when your insides are burning up is possibly one of the biggest tests one goes through as a human. You are in the wrong, you are the one at fault, you are the one that wanted this. So why is it so hard to stay on course and bravely embrace a new chapter you so highly wished for? Decorum is a tricky word. It implies self-control and propriety, but it also doesn’t account for the humanness in it all. The humanness of accepting defeat, pain, jealousy, radical mood shifts and perhaps the hardest one of all; loss. The loss of a partner, of a companion, of a friend, of a backbone, of a future. Decorum doesn’t allow you to incorporate the complexity of regret or jealousy. It simply asks you to be.
Many think that as our marriage was so “out of the box” then so should our divorce and the process that follows. “You will be friends, you both are cool like that” they say. While I do hope we get there, today is not a day for decorum to poke its expectations at me. Today, I want to be the crazy, reckless, emotional human only listening to my primal but excruciatingly honest sympathetic nervous system. I am aware of the other side of the coin, it is in me. But sometimes survival requires you to shut down one side to only focus on the other. There is not enough fuel inside to keep both functioning at the same time. My decorum right now is processing me, processing my primal urges of obsessively calling, rash anger and mental visions of hypothetical futures. I don’t think I would be comfortable giving outsiders any material to validate the cliche divorcee, but then again, isn’t that what decorum is? Keeping it together to avoid the cliche.
With us, it was never about who gets the couch or the tv, it was a raw and complicated knot of emotional string intertwined between the both of us. The rest is just stuff. What good is stuff to two broken hearts? That is our decorum I guess. Seeing the immense responsibility of each other’s hearts, protecting them and trying our best to be there. I don’t know what form that will take at this moment in time, but a girl can dream can’t she? If you were to ask me what divorcing with decorum actually entails, I would tell you it has nothing to do with the legal or material or even factual. It is carrying each other to respective chapters, without judgment, without fear, without anger, without punishment. It is love in its purest most unconditional form, to one’s own and to the person across from you on the same exact path as you. It is humanness like you have never seen it before. It is pushing your limits so far into the abyss that when you look back you realise you were always there, you just needed to push each other to get there. It is letting go with absolute respect and devotion. It is the most earth shattering pain you will ever endure, but it is also the most astonishing realisation of inner strength. It is taking your hats off and bowing in front of each other as equals, like two lions accepting the end of the battle.
