In January, I was sitting on a chair in my living room across from one of my oldest friends. We were drinking Manhattans and reminiscing. He and I met when we were sixteen and had been in touch on and off since. Once, he and his girlfriend came to the carriage house where my ex-husband and I lived. The four of us drank Krug and shared a cheese plate. I brought up that evening over the cocktails, wondering why we never became “couple friends.” He told me that after they left my house, his girlfriend said something to him about us being a nice couple, “We should hang out with them again.” He said he told her, “Hannah had a weird vibe.”
“She seemed nice.”
“She was perfectly nice but I don’t know who that was. It wasn’t really my friend.” And then, after a pause he said to me, “But you’re back.”
About six months ago, maybe seven, I started remembering the good parts of my relationship with my ex husband. If you’d come to me this time last year and asked me to tell you a happy memory of my ex, I would have told you a story about overhearing him on the phone with a younger man asking for business advice and an investment. After the guy had laid out his plan, my ex told him he did not like it and then said, “It is better to make an honest buck than a dishonest buck-fifty.” I like that story. It demonstrates an aspect of my ex-husband’s character and ethics that I admire.
But that story is not a happy memory of my ex, it’s a testament to one of the favorable aspects of his character. I am in the anecdote only as an observer. I only now am starting to have enough distance to tell you stories of happy memories, to remember why I had enough hope to marry in the first place. But this is not an essay about marriage proposals, nostalgia, nights in restaurants in Paris, eating take out in the city, or watching bad television on the couch. It’s not an essay about how I lost myself in my marriage or about the tremendous guilt I carry because of it. Over the last month, I have had crippling writer's block. I am not complaining. If I live by a gospel, it is that no one wants to hear conventionally attractive, financially stable New Yorkers complain about their lives. I can tell that I am finally in a place where I understand my marriage and my childhood and the lessons I have learned after spending time on my own.
I also feel comfortable with myself and my choices and my potential. I think life—boyfriends and trips and career choices, all of those things—is starting to happen again. How do I write about a life I used to have while living a new one?
What happens if I fall in love and the man I am in love with finds this publication and reads hundreds of pages about my divorce, about mourning, about regret? “You wrote this last week,” he might say, in reference to an essay about bad dates or divorces or ambivalence about children. How do I explain to him that I could only write it now because I am finally past it, how writing isn’t dwelling on the past, it’s moving on. How do I reassure him that I am not planning to mine our lives for essays about trite topics like love after thirty? How do I communicate to readers that a woman who is happy, fulfilled, silly, lighthearted, busy, and interested in things that are not herself is writing about important moments to communicate what she’s learned, not to dwell? Do people understand that I have never written out of vengeance or disrespect? That I have strong ethical boundaries about what I say and what I keep to myself? Does it matter? How can we know the dancer from the dance?
So I sat at my computer, nearly every day for hours and hours and looked at a blank document and sometimes typed: “I have so much to say and I forgot how to say any of it.” I was overcome with a fear that my words will always be misinterpreted, that my intentions will always be assumed ill. I fell into a bit of a depression and decided that I should only write fiction and then that I should not write at all. And then, I thought: Hannah, decide what you want. I am a writer and I want to keep being one and the only way to do that is to write.
This publication will now be published at least six times a month. Four paid and two free essays guarantees, with the sincere intention of publishing more free content. I have paused paid subscriptions while I catch up on paid content. I am a creative and we are notoriously bad with deadlines. Sometimes my essays will be late. I am just as mad at myself about it as you are at me. There will be more of a mix of topics here, less frequent but more impactful stories about me. More about modern life, dating, style, friendship. I’d like to write more advice, if you’d like some please email me your question—if you reply to this email it goes directly to my inbox.
About six weeks ago, my brother sent me fifty pages of poems he had written. I told him I’d have notes within one hundred hours. I just printed the pages. I think I’m back.
I love you, so very much. Thank you for being here.
Hannah Stella
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I haven’t see a post from Hannah in almost a month- am I still subscribed?
When I was getting back into dating after my divorce a man said to me, I don't think we can ever be serious until you are completely over the hurt. Granted it had been two years but I didn't like the thought of a timeline on my ability to process and grow from such a traumatic time. My partner now had to accept a lot of things about post-divorce Sarah. I will not marry again, I will not be held back in my career and literally thousands of other quirks that manifested from my divorce and the grief and healing that followed. All this to say, I got hurt a few more times post divorce being worried about how the perception of my past would mold the current perception of me, once I let that go, I have found lasting happiness.