Tag: divorce

About Me

Navigating Life Changes: Embracing Creativity Without AI

Autumn

My divorce came with the sense of being excommunicated for falling from grace. There’s something romantic about that, as if I were the servant of a petty god who found disfavor with me and cast me out to tread upon mortal ground, and now here I am picking my way along a rocky hiking trail as a warm October wind smacks me in the nose with dead leaves. Not every moment can be cinematic.

I hiked until my fear of heights kicked in, and while I’m logically certain that my feet were solidly planted on the ground, I couldn’t stop the light-headed notion that every footstep was perpetually sliding towards the edge and my inevitable death, so I turned around and headed home, much to my dog’s relief. He’s not a fan of windy heights either.

The thing is …

My AI art set up was dependent on that grace from which I have fallen. Unfortunately, my posts about how to generate AI art are the most popular, go figure.

The depressing part is that it’s not like AI art even meaningfully existed until a couple of years ago, yet now I feel the loss of it deeply. No more character portraits. No more setting the scene. No more visual supplements for my writing. At least not the same way that I used to.

I could download Stable Diffusion et al, but at the moment it doesn’t feel right. I’m too busy relearning how to be mortal … free from the gaze of my petty god.

Perhaps instead I’ll go back to my roots. I’ll channel the energy of that 17-year-old who’s Creative Writing teacher advised her to express all of her emotions through writing, and all she needed was a gel pen and a notebook.

We can save the fancy technology for the editing phase.

Meanwhile, I’ll have to figure out how to draw traffic to my blog without all the fancy keywords and visuals.

About Me

Overcoming Anxiety: My Journey to Healing

Autumn

It’s difficult to start.

I was so stressed out that I was vomiting and I ended up losing 20lbs in two months. I also spent a month in crisis counseling.

I also learned how to reach out and open up, to tell the people around me about what was going on. I discovered that people are a lot more supportive than I expected … and that the truth of my situation was a lot more visible than I had been led to believe.

And now here I am, in a better place. Quite literally, too. I have a great view of the sunset from my new home, and I’m in walking distance of nature — I like to take my dog out and have small chats with strangers.

I also still have anxiety when my doorbell sensor goes off. The occasional bad dream. Triggers that lead to quiet meltdowns … in a nutshell, PTSD.

Not exactly the life I dreamed of. I keep going round and round in my head, asking, “Can one person really cause this much damage?” It seems so unbelievable, that a person can hurt someone this much without it being a crime. Yet it happened. I know it every time I step on the scale and see how much weight I have yet to gain back.

The far more important question now is, “Where do I go from here?”

I often wonder if my fantasy life — the way I imagine myself getting up and spending the days if everything was perfect — is achievable or not. I have a clean house now, with white walls. Day-to-day life is running more smoothly than it has in a long, long time, and my thoughts are feeling more alive than they have in years. So maybe, just maybe, I can achieve my dreams.

I’m definitely not getting bombarded with criticism and demands the way I was not too long ago.

Let’s work on baby steps.

I want to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. So let’s write. Casual. Small. No pressure sort of writing. Free writes. Story snippets. Totally random stuff that has nothing to do with anything.

Then one day, I’ll pick my bigger projects back up and start self-publishing novels again.

You ready?

I’m not sure if I am.

But I can’t spend my life always waiting for the next crisis to hit. I want to take charge and make my dreams come true.

About Me

Embracing Self-Confidence Post-Divorce

Autumn

I’ve been feeling really good about my physical appearance lately.

I find it very affirming that divorced me has healthier coloring and less bloating. Divorced me is more confident in my own body. Divorced me is better at socializing with complete strangers.

Not that I’m claiming rampant improvements across the board. I still haven’t figured out a huge portion of my life, so being able to smile at my reflection in the mirror feels like a small win.

I think that I’ve been doing a lot of internal improvements, particularly with rewriting my internal self to embrace the idea that I don’t have to be invisible. I’ve been working to join the “warm social world,” and have been pleasantly surprised at how many people respond positively to my comments about the weather (and other various small talk topics). Instead of being constantly self-critical and internalizing far too much, I just aim to be friendly and curious, and let everything else be as it is.

Awhile ago I mentioned that I’ve been trying to emulate what I think a strong and admirable character would do in my shoes. I admit that I feel plenty of pressure to throw myself out there and pursue success (why haven’t you found a real job yet?), but I think it’s important to fix the parts of me that led me to rock bottom, so to speak. Otherwise I might end up playing out the same story with new costumes.

And when I think of myself as the bleeding heart who was terrified of the spotlight, I realize how inevitable my fate was.

Not that I want to stop being empathic and supportive. Rather, I know that I need to do a better job of letting people go when I get bad vibes from them — something I witnessed in myself more recently when I kept a conversation going with someone who I strongly felt like they had huge red flags surrounding them, and I absolutely hated talking to them. I probably should have ghosted them, but I kept feeling guilty every time I didn’t reply.

So I really want to internalize the idea that it’s not wrong to protect myself from people who clash with me. It’s not wrong to prioritize people who make me feel safe to be around.

I don’t have to be the one who’s always understanding. I don’t have to be the one who’s patient and never gives up. I don’t have to be anyone’s savior — and I have learned to acknowledge the hubris that drives that particular ideology in the first place.

Phrases like, “No one understands me” are red flags, not challenges. Don’t try to be better and prove otherwise. Save the empathy and support for someone who appreciates it.

About Me

Finding Purpose After Divorce: A Personal Journey

Autumn

A divorce was a huge blow to my philosophical foundation.

For my entire life, I was unapologetically a believer in Love. After all, I had Venus in Pisces in my astrological chart, so there was no chance that I wouldn’t go through life full of whimsy and romance. If you do your best to be good to someone, then they’ll be good to you in return, right? Cue happily ever after?

Except … no.

Maybe the world isn’t full of people who are trying to do their best. Maybe there are too many personality disorders who are all too willing to exploit others. Maybe selfish transactional-ism is the law of the land, and you should never believe anyone who claims otherwise.

And maybe there is no such thing as partners for life anymore. Maybe society is just too broken.

Throughout the entire process, I stated repeatedly that I didn’t want a divorce and that I opposed the idea, but he had done something back in April (that I haven’t the guts to talk about) that resulted in an enormous amount of social pressure on me to go through with it. From complete strangers, to boot. And given that he was solid in his decision to dump me, there wasn’t anything to fight for. Everyone around me said that it was for the best.

Worldview be damned.

But then, what do I believe in now?

One of my biggest fears is to end up as a bitter old woman, that people get together and blow off steam about over coffee because I’m that difficult to put up with. So eventually I have to find a new purpose — that is my end goal here.

And it dawned on me that my philosophical foundation was bigger than I had previously realized.

I’m still a mother, still doing my best day after day to love and support my children, homeschooling them, sharing in their interests, and cleaning up after them — my first duty is to them and their well-being.

I still have an image of the sort of person I want to be, full of life and optimism, wise yet forever untainted by the hardships of life.

Maybe my happily ever after doesn’t include a male partner, but I’m not lonely. I still have people to love, and who love me in return. I can still have an open heart.

Life doesn’t run a clear course
It flows through from within
It’s supposed to take you places and leave markings on your skin

Poets of the Fall – Love Will Come to You

About Me

Embracing Change: My Journey After Divorce

Autumn

It’s been a very bad year.

I’m still pretty scared to talk about specifics, so suffice to say that I had a plethora of brand new experiences, met a variety of people, and stepped well outside of my comfort zone in ways that I never would have imagined.

Oh, and I’m also now divorced.

Turns out that you can spend years working your butt off to love and care for your soulmate, only to have it turn out that you’re the wrong “context” for them and they don’t want to be with you anymore. Oh, and they also loathe the way you state the obvious. And the way you associate concepts together. And, and, and …

Maybe one day my heart will stop hemorrhaging.

You know all those statistics that claim that women fare better emotionally after divorces? Not true in my case. Aside from the soul-crushing devastation, there’s the intense feelings of betrayal and rejection, as well as feeling like a defective failure at life. Did this happen because I’m too fat? I dunno. Better stop eating just in case.

Only I know I’m not fat. It’s the stress and pain triggering body dysmorphia — my subconscious attempt to take control of something that’s completely out of my control. Even if I weighed only 90lbs and had the flattest abs in the world, I’d still be discarded. I’m still “that” woman.

So I’ve spent hours and hours crying until I was too dehydrated and exhausted to keep crying. I’ve had numerous meltdowns, and moments when it felt like I didn’t have the strength to keep living. Life doesn’t come with a pause button that lets you get your feet back underneath you, it just keeps plowing ahead no matter what’s going on, and getting dragged along leaves you feeling even more banged up.

Then one day I woke up and I felt like eating again. So it is true that time does eventually heal some wounds.

Though I am now dirt-eating poor.

I looked into getting a job or attending an online community college, but those options didn’t feel remotely right for me. You know how it is when everything you built up over the years gets abruptly yanked out from underneath you, you feel trapped in an aimless free fall where absolutely nothing could possibly get worse than it already is, and you say to yourself, “Well, I did always want to earn a living as a writer.”

That’s what I’m going to do.

I’m going to earn a living as a writer. It’s not just about getting by, but finding a new purpose in life — a reason for everything, and a means to express the hurt.

When I feel sad, I can research and implement marketing tactics to keep myself distracted (especially now that I know that I can survive far outside of my comfort zone). I can write about how much I hate men in my novels (facetious exaggeration, don’t take that seriously). I can start churning out as much fiction as I can possibly write, and I will build a new life for myself that can’t be unraveled so easily. And I will do it all while still cooking delicious dinners and homeschooling my children, because I can be that awesome no matter how hard it is. Sleep is overrated anyway.

I’ve spent the last few months telling myself over and over, “If you want things to be different, then you have to do something different.”

And I’m starting to feel ready to do something different.