A Thousand Choices

In the first few weeks after my ex announced he wanted a divorce, I had to make a thousand choices. It was overwhelming at times, liberating at other times, and just plain hard work all the time. One thing it taught me was that it is impossible to make all good decisions, not just at a time like this, but at any time of life. The pressure to make decisions RIGHT NOW one after another, meant that I had to make choices based on gut instinct and I was often telling myself that sometimes I was just going to have to make a decision and it didn’t matter whether it was right or wrong, just that it was made and was behind me, so that I could move forward. And I would fix those decisions later if they were wrong, because in the future, I would have the cushion to be able to fix things.

I had to make decisions about what to put in storage (let me tell you, it was almost entirely books.) 60 boxes of books went into storage for about two years, and then, when I finally had the space to think about it, I realized that I didn’t need 60 boxes of my own books, and winnowed it down to 1 box of each of my traditionally published books. I haven’t opened even one of those boxes at this point, and I sometimes wonder if I want even those. But it was a bit painful when I filled up the back of my SUV with all of those books and drove them to the thrift store, knowing they might all be destroyed. This was my new life now, and those books were largely a vestige of my old life, the writer life. I’m still a writer now, as it turns out, but I’m writing entirely different books.

I put a bunch of children’s toys in storage, as well. I’d saved them from when my kids were small because I had this idea that I’d want them for grandkids, if I ever had any. And there were two or three that I saved later, but most of these also went to the thrift store, because I realized that I would probably want new toys if grandkids ever came along.

Some of the things I kept were sentimental, things to do with the marriage. My wedding dress, the wedding rings, photos of our marriage. I eventually threw out the wedding dress, because none of my girls will ever wear it, and also because after a marriage has failed, that feels like the right thing to do. I still don’t know what to do with the rings. The photos are in an album in the garage, and I did get them out once to look at them. It wasn’t as painful at this point as it would have been in the past.

I left some things in the marital home I wish I hadn’t. I threw out some things I wish I hadn’t. But overall, I’m happy with 80% of the choices I made in the heat of the moment. I could only do the best I could do, and that phrase has always been difficult for me to say because I’m always assuming I could have done better. But I’m learning to accept I’m human and that means I have to make choices and some of those choices will be bad. I could have tried to delay making the choices until I felt sure that they were all right. But that delay would have stopped my progress moving into my new life, and I still would have gotten a lot of them wrong.

The truth is that we don’t know who we’re going to become in the future. We can’t know that. If we knew, we’d already be that person. But in my case, the changes from when I was in my thirties or even forties to now are very extreme. Leaving Mormonism, having a marriage end, having children grow up and leave the house, and starting a job in an entirely and unexpected new field are not what most people do. Some, yes. Some of you know what I’m talking about on a deep level. Others not so much. It’s one of my perpetual problems, trying to talk to that old voice in my head of what I expected as a young person of my future life. All those gut instinct choices ultimately brought me here. And most of them weren’t made on a conscious level, just feeling out what seemed right at the time and throwing myself into them.

I’m really trying hard not to be sad about some of the things I lost or some of the wrong choices I made (some were doozies, trust me). I was in an extreme situation and I was floundering about, sometimes thwacking the people who were brave enough to stand around me. Sorry about that! I am letting go of wishing I’d done better because I did better as soon as I could, and really, what else could I have done? I don’t wish I’d done nothing. One thing that is true about me is that I DO things. I am a doer. I am a thinker, yes. But I don’t sit by and watch my life happen. I suppose that’s why I’m where I am, so far from where I started. I do the things I feel have to be done and let the consequence follow (this is an old quote from a Mormon hymn that I suppose on some level I still believe in).

Maybe the truth is that we all have to make a thousand choices every day. We just don’t realize it. One of the gifts of divorce was that my eyes were opened to the number of choices I was making because they led me down a new path I hadn’t ever let myself go down before. I’m trying to get used to that phrase “gift of the divorce,” because it really did not feel like a gift for most of the last four years. And I have been anxious for most of that time to make sure people knew it wasn’t MY choice. I would have stayed. But I’m not sure that’s really a good thing anymore. Here I am, standing miles down the path I did choose in so many ways. And I am not ashamed of being on this path. Most of the time, anyway, when my brain is being controlled by the new Mette and not the old Mette.

I fucked up plenty. I chose well sometimes. But mostly, I am just human and we make so many of our choices blindly, without having all the information. For all that we pretend that we are going to be “fully informed” about our choices, that is actually impossible. This is one of the true lessons of the story of the Garden of Eden. We’re always choosing stuff that we don’t understand because how could we? And then we get the consequences of the ignorant decision that we made. Welcome to the mortal world, you poor human bastards! We don’t get to go back to ignorance. And maybe someone will save us, but mostly if someone does, it’s us. We save ourselves, and if we’re really lucky, we have a chance to save someone else back farther along the path. That is, really, what this Substack is.