D-I-V-O-R-C-E

Lessons from the trenches, five years later.

It was September of 2016 when I realized my marriage was over. And with five years behind me, I’m keenly aware that I don’t talk about my divorce in a public way—that’s a conscious decision. Such matters are private, in the first place. Second, and maybe more relevant, we need time to process the moments that shake our lives. Those moments dump us into a whirlwind (or what feels like a whirling blender), and this writing space has become focused on that part of me that looks for lessons.

I always hope that my lessons will have value for someone else—all of us need to understand the storms that blow through. So, I’ll try to talk about divorce in a way that’s appropriate here. A writing exercise like this one is a search for me. In one sense, I don’t know what I’m searching for—that’s why I’m writing. Or maybe I just need to remind myself of a few things.

I’ll begin with this: when the news hit me that fall—your marriage is over—it was the shock that knocked me down, not heartbreak.

We stumble through life with our eyes pointed in a certain direction. The future looks clear, or at least like it’s been defined, and then one day the universe slaps us silly and turns our head toward a raging fire. Maybe you know that feeling. Let’s call it shock, then. It’s sort of like hell on earth, the idea that your life on a random Tuesday can be completely different than the way you perceived it on Monday. Your perception of tomorrow is pummeled into submission.

Every system in you rebels when September 20th turns September 19th on its head. The human psyche isn’t built to handle that kind of change. When it happens, our bodies react in all sorts of ways. It’s a fight or flight response. Adrenaline zooms. Our normal appetites run for cover. Sleep becomes something foreign—a distant, dreamless wish. Bodies hit with this particular Mack truck will do anything but rest. Or eat. In the days and weeks that followed September 20th, 2016, I lost twenty-five pounds. Quickly. If I slept at all, it was for a couple of hours a night.

Still, I’d do my best to rest that fall. I’d force myself to swallow a banana or an egg, aware that I needed nourishment. I say force because I mostly wanted to vomit, so it was an effort of will to get some food in me. And finally, during the second week, someone suggested melatonin as a route toward sleep. Sleep came then, but I remember that it felt like weird sleep. Though it’s natural, the melatonin made me feel strange, in a way that I can’t articulate. But maybe my head felt funny because it was trying to adjust to something I didn’t understand.

And that’s really where this piece is going—the part about understanding. To make a long story short, I spent the next several months trying to figure out what happened. What happened to the person I married, and how could they be so different? What had changed, and how had I failed to notice? If you’ve been in a similar spot, you might recognize some truth in the idea that Google doesn’t answer those questions. But I probably did thousands of Google searches in an effort to unravel the details of my own life.

All the answers I needed were on the inside, though, and I wish I’d known that then. I might have saved myself months of misery by putting a microscope on me. I don’t know how long it took me to figure it out, but the person I’d married hadn’t changed at all. If there were things about her that were incompatible with me, they always existed. And maybe I even recognized those things before I married her.

If there was a single thing I needed to understand, it was simply that I’d married the wrong person, and the courtship was doomed from the start. It really doesn’t get any simpler than that. If someone had handed me that nugget on September 20th, 2016, I probably wouldn’t have listened. I was too busy scrambling for answers (and solutions) that weren’t there.

Loss can lead us to dark, obsessive places, though. And anger can do that, too.

I can tell you this: the two things that finally shined some light on my life were simple, and the first is gratitude. There’s a lot of power in being thankful for what you do have. I think I recognized that right away, but I didn’t give enough credit to the concept, maybe because it’s too damned simple. If I had grasped it earlier, maybe I wouldn’t have suffered and moaned for so long. The things we do have are a lot more important than those things that elude us. That’s where our focus should be: I’m grateful for...

The second is a willingness to step beyond anger. When you’re angry at someone, you’re giving them power over you. I can’t be any clearer. Again, this concept might seem too easy. It must be more complicated than that, right?

But I was consumed with anger for a long time. It’s worth noting when and how the anger left me: on a certain day, it became abundantly clear. My ex-wife didn’t see the world the way I saw it, and she never would. Her story of our marriage was far different than mine, and I couldn’t change that. Oh—and she didn’t care if I was angry or not. Armed with that idea, I felt the anger fall away, like dead skin rolling off my shoulders. And with that metaphorical exfoliation, I gained a lot of power.

When someone says, “Ooh, they make me so mad,” you might want to remind the offended person that anger is a decision. We decide to be angry. And we’re a lot healthier when we decide that anger isn’t on our menu. Anger takes far too much of our emotional energy, and we can focus that energy on more positive things.

If there’s a final lesson, one that holds as much power as gratitude and anger, it might be definition. That is, I define who I am. And you define who you are. That’s a decision, not a whole lot different from the decision to be angry (or not). It doesn’t matter what people say about you when you know who you are. You don’t need to respond. How you approach each day, the person you want to be, and who you are—those decisions belong to you. And they belong to me.

Nobody’s life is perfect, and changes will always move in. Sometimes they’ll pack a formidable punch. But here’s the thing: you decide how to handle that punch. Your reaction is your own. It might hurt, and it might knock you off your feet. But you always have the power to stand up. Besides, you might have people who are counting on you to get on your feet.

As you try to stand, anger will just get in your way. Gratitude will always give you strength. How’s that for advice? Don’t be mad, just be thankful, and then you’ll be able to do things that didn’t seem possible. You might even find that you’re powerful.

Back in September of 2016, a friend of mine said, “I don’t know how you’re standing.”

It was early in the process, and I had a long way to go, maybe because I’d chosen to suffer. Remember, we choose our reactions to the things that befall us. But something poked at me five years ago, even as I was sleepless and shedding pounds. I nodded at my daughters and answered him. “See those kids there? I have to stand for them,” I said. “I have to smile. For them. I don’t have any choice.”