The Divorce Chronicles: I got divorced today
We saw each other for the first time in over a month since splitting homes two days ago. I didn’t really have any expectations or know what I would feel because this is unlike any other experience I have been through. He didn’t acknowledge me and didn’t look at me. I was searching for those familiar eyes but all I saw was extensive space and emptiness. It hurt. It hurt so much, I realised my daily routine of going to bed early, not drinking, exercising, meditating, TED talks, dog walks and all the ‘checklist’ things you need to be doing to get better weren’t working. “Mum, I need to see someone for some added support”, I said to her that evening.
Everyone around us probably think we are fundamentally insane to still be working together. We don’t see each other everyday at the office or even talk, but this week was a fair that had been delayed for two year due to Covid. It was the first big return of our industry and we had been planning for the last year to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Day 1 I was whisked away by my mum to a psychiatrist to possibly be prescribed antidepressants for this first time in my life. I am someone who allows her body to naturally heal or feel pain until it gets to the irrational stage. I am very self-aware when it comes to my limits, and I had reached my limit. My brain is quite dark right now. The best way to describe it is that there is a constant fire happening inside my body and nothing I do extinguishes it even in the slightest.
Day 2, today. I wake up at 6 am to an email letting my know that my husband had confirmed the second part of the divorce proceedings. He was the one who applied so I had no chance to go against it in any way. He had the power. I wasn’t quite sure what the process was so I thought it would take a few more days to process. But then, as I was speaking to a colleague about an important upcoming meeting with a client, there it appeared on my phone: “You are now divorced”.
Initially I was so shocked I couldn’t react. I waited to end my meeting then pulled myself aside and just like any heartbroken girl, I called my mum. She said she would meet me outside to get some air. I think I held it together until she came out of pure survival. The second she showed up my entire body started shaking and my breathing became extremely unpredictable. I was in a dream. This wasn’t happening to me, right now, in the middle of all of this. I was 31, a professional, working at a fair. How could they just send me an email like a business transaction? Where was the love and softness that existed at the beginning of this path? How could something so significant start of so humanely and end so robotically?
I was angry. I was angry at him for applying, although I was just as at fault, if not more. I was angry at the institution of marriage for making it seem so easy. I was angry at myself for getting in this mess. I was angry. The control freak in me was screaming, shaking, begging for a way out, but there was nothing I could do. I had to surrender whether I liked it or not.
Today was probably the hardest day of my life. Moving homes was hard, my dad’s cancer diagnosis was hard, my grandmother’s death was hard. But this, this burned my very existence. I was sitting there, among colleagues attempting to hide the very fact that I did not want to exist anymore. I am sitting at the front desk right now writing this. My now ex-husband (wow that is weird to say) messaged me asking if we could go out to get some air after his meetings but he hasn’t had time yet. It will be the first time we talk face-to-face since we split homes. I think I am still in a daze and the crash will happen later on. I am not looking forward to it but I am also not conditioning myself in any way. I am trying my best to just let myself feel and process as feelings come.
I don’t know what is going to happen. I don’t know what my path holds. It is a very dark, muddy, obstacle-filled path right now. Existing is taking everything I have in me, but one thing I realised while writing this is that I got divorced around six hours ago. I am now a “divorcee”, but I have plastered on my best face, I am smiling at customers who come and ask for my now ex-husband, and I am keeping it together. I am strong. I know I will look back at this and think, “Wow, that is some fucked up shit you went through, but you went through it”. I know there will come a day where I will cry out of pride, not out of fear or pain, and when that day comes I will find my word. The word that Elizabeth Gilbert searches for throughout Eat, Pray, Love and finally lands on as “Attraversiamo” meaning let’s cross. The day my word comes to me is the day I know my healing has truly evolved and also the day where I can stop hating, being angry and coming from a place of lack.
We are both broken and I don’t know what our future holds as exes, business partners, friends, or any other endless possibility. I have realised that instead of holding on, clinging to the past and resisting the future, if we have any chance of going forward, I have to surrender, I have to let go, I have to keep calm and carry on (I have this written on my arm and yet I still cannot embrace it). So I guess this me, saying to you, I am letting go. I am letting go of the hopes and dreams, the family, the companionship, the love, the respect, the safety, the home. I am letting go in the hopes that one someday, somewhere, somehow, we find each other again, whole, healed, happy and at peace with where we are. It is ok to be sad, angry, hurt, broken, weak. I am ok with not being ok. I am proud of not being ok. There is nothing insincere about my feelings. But I am also proud of the resilience I have shown. Today I got divorced. Today a chapter ended. Today a part of me ended and that’s ok.
