Divorce
It’s been a while, over a year in fact, since I’ve posted here. I haven’t been writing much and have turned my focus (no pun) to photography. But that isn’t the only reason. I’ve wanted to wait until this most recent stage of my life was officially done to talk about it openly.
A week ago today my divorce was finalised. It was less than a year between the marriage ceremony and the final conversation in my back yard when we admitted that the relationship had deteriorated past the point of being salvaged.
My wife, we’ll call her S, asked that I not blog about the relationship until after the official end and I’ve honoured her wishes. Even so, there will be no finger-pointing or blaming. Suffice it to say, our individual daemons were perfectly suited to feed off each other.
S and I each had childhoods, and adulthoods, rife with trauma and pain. Those experiences left their marks in the ways we each see and engage with life. The hard-coded neural pathways of trauma can lead us to believe things that aren’t there, always assuming the worst, and fail to appreciate what we have because of some nebulous fear it will be taken away.
In the end, neither of us was happy. What had started as a beautiful joining of two souls that seemed destined to fit together like puzzle pieces ended when those pieces turned out to be shaped entirely differently than we thought.
It has been five and a half months since the night we said goodbye for the last time. Because there were no disagreements over property or money, the divorce was done entirely by mail and we never had to appear in court.
Though things did not work out as we thought they would, I am grateful for the experience. I learned a great many things about myself, most of them positive, and know that should I ever be in another relationship I now have the tools to be a healthy partner whereas I did not before. Even my realising the marriage was over, and saying so, is a sign of how far I’ve come.
Today, I am content. I am alone again, but I am not lonely. Even in the midst of the societal lockdown resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic I am starting to like myself and am able to sit with who I am without needing to escape. Sure, I have things I still want to work on but compared to who I was 5 years ago, hell even 2 years ago, I’m doing pretty well.
