No More Kicking and Screaming?

This week I received the final payment from the divorce settlement agreement last year. It is still sinking in that the divorce is, finally, over. At least in the sense that a marriage is ever over. No more whining and complaining about it. No more kicking and screaming, right?

Going through a divorce has irrevocably changed me. Just as the death of my youngest child changed me. And leaving the religion of my childhood changed me. These are parts of me that I can’t erase, even if I sometimes wish that I could. But I’m genuinely trying to figure out what happens now. I haven’t, to my own chagrin, suddenly become all lightness and positivity. I suppose that I had imagined that this last puzzle piece put together would mean that I would let go of the breath I’ve been holding for the last ten or so years and that I would ride off into the sunset.

Where is that sunset now? Has anyone seen it? It keeps shifting and changing.

I hope that things will settle in my head and that I will learn to have a new default, one that is less defensive and more optimistic? I’m not going to start telling everyone that the best part of life is always ahead. I don’t know yet because I haven’t gotten there yet. I hope there are still good things out there for me, but I suspect that mostly, life will be more the same than it is different. Because, yes, I am the same and not as much different as I wanted to be. I am great at checklists, but I’m not as great at the deeper kind of reflection that I think makes the changes inside, the ones that only I notice and other people don’t.

I have a friend who likes to remind me that I get to choose every day who I am going to be. No matter what other people choose to do around me, I still get to choose who I am, and that I can also change who I am if I want to.

I sometimes think quietly “fuck you” when my friend tells me this.

But yes, my friend is probably right. Sometimes when people tell you the truth, you don’t like to hear it. Or is that only me?

Here is the problem: I don’t even know who I want to be. That is what has come of the unraveling of all of the fifty-four years of the previous life I’ve led. I’ve deconstructed so much and what I am left with it a lot of old habit and the terror of too many changes too soon, hanging on to old vestiges I’m not sure I want to keep. The conscious rebuilding of the very foundation of myself is really, really hard work.

(Can you hear the whine in that?)

I don’t know who I want to be. Most of my life has been spent judging other people who weren’t as good as I thought they should be, and also judging myself along the way. I don’t want to be a lot of other people. Most of my heroes have fallen to fiery deaths. I could choose to do nothing. Maybe that would be a safer path than trying to do more, trying to make a bigger version of myself rather than a smaller one.

But I think I’m going to spend the next thirty years doing more of this deconstructing and I’m afraid of that. I haven’t much liked it, to tell you the truth. It’s painful and even if I think it’s necessary, I really wish I could undo it most of the time.

Maybe not this time, though? Maybe this time I really will become someone I want to be, someone I admire, someone I could laugh with without worrying about being mocked, someone who thinks big thoughts and holds herself accountable, but can also be gentle and knows how to let go of that perfectionism that is always getting in the way of the beautiful parts of life that are also messy and come with plenty of kicking and screaming.

(Pic of me out celebrating my new life!)