One Year of Messy, She Wrote
Making peace with "right" and "hard"
Dear readers,
It has been one year this month since I began writing “Messy, She Wrote.” I started as a freshly separated mother of two, armed with the intention of blowing on the embers of the feral woman I detected inside of me and letting in anyone who wanted a look at the process. The process of undoing a life for the sake of rebuilding a soul. There’s something holy about the energy that boils to the surface right after you’ve done something terribly brave and profoundly devastating, and I have tried to bottle that here.
I’ve written about the initial fallout after divorce, about parenting during divorce, rage and anger, loneliness and despair, how to know when to leave, putting your life back together, the way fear never leaves the proverbial room, and much more. It’s been healing for me to share, and an honor to do it with all of you. Thank you for being here, reading, sharing, and bonding with me over your own experiences!
Writing here has proven tricky - I continue to be uncertain about where the line “should” be in terms of what and how I share about my life. I know this: when I don’t write, it’s like I’m not breathing, like the carbon dioxide is building up in my system. When I don’t write, the words crawl on the inside of my skin, making me wriggle and itch until they find a way to bust through the surface. So I keep writing.
On January 4, 2023 I legalized my divorce at my kitchen table over a zoom call. My marriage ended quietly over a year before that, sometime in November of 2021. In the in between, I lost so much that it feels as if I was pared down to nothing but the rattled bones of a skeletal frame, and built back crumb by crumb, tendon by tendon. Divorce shattered what I thought of the world, and of people.
As a child of divorce, I entered it as an adult with a realistic view of the carnage, but as a millennial with four years of therapy under her belt, I was also idealistic about what could be. I felt hopeful that everyone could give each other compassion and basic trust in each other’s goodness, intent, and agency. I thought it could be more than a bottom line. I was wrong to hope as much.
If 2023 taught me anything, it’s that we are ultimately alone. I know it’s harsh and dismal, but it is also the truth. We can lose any relationship at any time. Even people we trusted for years, or decades. We are not entitled to an ongoing relationship with anyone in life: not our parents, our siblings, our spouses, our in laws, our children, our friends. What we have a guarantee on is just one person, and one moment: ourselves, right now.
Despite all of the dogma I was taught about my inherent badness and incapacity, I’m learning how to value myself enough to show up every day as my own dream partner, cheerleader, dream keeper. It turns out I can do a lot of things, including take proper care of myself, my finances, my home, and my children. Even still, I hope to keep rebuilding my faith in others, in love, in family, and in community. Because even while loss is a guarantee, togetherness and the hope it fosters is, I think, foundational to carrying on, to thriving, to experiencing life in full color.
My soul is still in the tug of war that comes in the aftermath of something as seismic as divorce without a family village. My dreams tell the story of the back and forth, vacillating at night between breathtaking dreamscapes where my body is floating and I am in quiet, contented awe, the sun dappled on fantastical tall trees with unthinkably large, colorful leaves rustling in the breeze. Other dreams bring terrible distress, running from predators in dark buildings with unforgivable and unknowable hallways, I am clammy and pressed and desperate to escape. My whole being is in transit from old to new, and it turns out it takes a long fucking while to make the journey. It turns out that actually, the journey is your whole life.
I am disillusioned and trust less, but I am also freer, happier, wiser, and steadier. And: life is still a fight. We cannot make enough right choices to cross a threshold where we no longer struggle - that’s not how this works. Every day I think more carefully about the time I waste being angry, or worse, sad. I know the time is non refundable. I’m still fumbling my way through the dance with my new life, of reconciling the fact that something that is definitively right can also be quite painful, lonely, and chronically difficult.
This Christmas was the first time I didn’t tuck my kids into bed on Christmas Eve or wake up with them Christmas morning. It struck me the afternoon of Christmas Day that I have a habitual predilection of associating any negative experience or difficult emotion with personal failing. In other words: “Christmas is now harder because I am a bad person who somewhere, somehow, messed something up… like, cosmically.” But is that really so? (It is not really so.)
I had an insight that took lot of weight off my chest and it was this: What if we saw the hardships we face in adulthood and the corresponding, painful spiritual shifts not as something punitive, not as a stain to scrub out, but as the entrance of a new stage, a natural shift, a progression into maturation. A medal of sorts. You’ve arrived! What if we let adulthood be what it is (objectively, empirically hard) without adding anything more to it. What if I accepted that I had my time of childhood ignorance (if I do my best and have pure intentions things will go alright for me) and what if I accepted my new view of the clusterfuck called living as just what it is: reality, nothing more.
What if I accepted that grief is like the clouds in the sky, like the grass coming up each year, like the beating of my heart: it just is. Here at the table with us. What if I set it all down for a moment, turned on John Prine and danced a little?
Wishing you a lighter load, a stronger heart, and a happy new year.
Love,
Jolie
