a life of one's own
the tale of two particularly devastating mornings in my life.
For the first time in my life, I do not feel particularly young. I am thirty-four. Divorced. I have a makeshift and dysfunctional career. I usually believe that I could be more successful but either my choices or my depression or some combination of the two has stopped me. Or, I would like to believe that those things stopped me. But that isn’t really the whole truth. The great internal project of my thirties has been being entirely honest with myself.
I– more or less– stopped writing publicly about a year ago. I remember the moment my creativity was zapped. It was a nice, spring morning. I sat at my dining table on my computer. I planned to continue working on a novel and also to write an essay detailing a bit more of the messy parts of my divorce. I always feel slightly ambivalent writing about my divorce. It is the life event that defines much of who I am. Not because Wife is a particularly important honorific or because Divorcee is a particularly embarrassing one. Rather, because being alone and the optionality that solitude gave me has solidified all of the traits that I have that I am proud of and also made me keenly aware of everything I am deeply ashamed about. I was on a walk once, with another divorced friend.
“I hate that all of that happened. I wish it hadn’t,” I said to him.
“I agree, it was awful, it’s still awful.”
“But.” I shrugged, “I like this person, I am a much better, more interesting person than I was before and I don't think I could have become her if I was still married. Or maybe if I hadn’t been through the divorce. So perhaps it had to happen. Maybe it will have been worth it.”
“I like the person I am now better too.” He said, “but it was very expensive to get here.” He didn’t mean financially. Money is the least costly part of the divorce process. All of this to say, I worry that writing endlessly about a life event that happened nearly three years ago is uninteresting. Or, perhaps, that it makes me seem immature, unable to move on. A lonely and sad spinster who escaped what she thought was a golden cage only to realize that she had run from freedom into a prison of her own making. None of those things feel particularly true to me but I am also too aware that my career is to be perceived and that I cannot control those perceptions.
But that isn’t why I stopped writing. That morning, before I started my essay, I opened an email from an acquaintance of mine who had been mentioned– without their name being used– in something I had previously published.