Maybe that’s an odd epiphany to have, but I was forced into a “fresh start”, and figuring out how to move forward has been … difficult. Part of me felt like I should reject everything about who I was and be a totally different person, to protect myself in the future. More pragmatic, less vulnerable.
But there are a lot of things about me that I like.
I like that I’m a writer, for one. It’s a deep passion that I keep coming back to, no matter what life throws at me — a calling that I’m lucky to have as an anchor.
I like that I’m a fiber artist. I like creating beautiful things out of fabric, thread, and yarn, and the way the kids love the items I make for them. Heck, I even love the “Did you make that?” attention that I get in public.
So maybe I don’t need to jump into a new education to build a new career as a new person. Maybe I can stay exactly who I am and peddle the skills I already have.
Despite what I’ve been told, my skills are valid.
I am valid.
I don’t have to reject me just because he did.
So here we are on day two of NaNoWriMo. I’ve decided to handwrite my first draft for now, and I like working with the TV playing in the background. It feels cozy to be curled up in my recliner with my favorite blanket and a notebook propped against the armrest. I have yet to feel a deep connection with the story and characters, but I am making progress in the words.
I over-prepared with the Halloween candy and didn’t get many trick-or-treaters, so now I’m left wondering how much I should give to my kids versus how much I should hoard for myself. You know the stereotype of writers who smoke while typing away? For me it’s candy.
If I hoard the leftovers for myself, I’ll certainly be well stocked for NaNoWriMo.
(I wrote this yesterday, and forgot to hit ‘publish’ 😅)
Since I now have joint custody, I have tons and tons of child-free time for myself, and my house is probably a little excessively clean these days (do I really need to scrub down the walls every week?). I want to kick myself back into the writing habit, and the timing lines up perfectly for NaNoWriMo! Yay!
Which, admittedly, I probably won’t follow the way it’s intended. I am still a mom, and I still have plenty of days of childcare on my plate. Maybe I’ll take 2 months to make up for the 50-50 time division.
Participating in NaNoWriMo also feels like coming full circle, since the last time I gave it a shot I ended up meeting my now-ex-husband, and never finished that story. It’s time for me to reclaim the path I had wanted to journey so many years ago, after all those broken promises and surrendered dreams.
It’s hard to explain the sort of relief I feel, at the thought of planning out an entire month knowing that each day should be more-or-less predictable … or how terrified I am that they won’t be. However, I can’t let fear of what may or may not happen dictate my choices for me, so I might as well plow ahead like everything is going to be boring and stable.
So let’s jump right into the action plan:
I’m going to be continuing Runemaster, rather than coming up with anything new. Maybe it’s cheating that I already have a portion written, but I’m working with the limitations here — what I went through this year is not the sort of stuff that one just “moves on” from. So, rather than inventing anything new from my poor exhausted brain, I’m sticking with characters that are already familiar. Deeply familiar, in this case, considering that I originally created these characters about 20 years ago. Writing this novel will be very emotionally comforting for a number of reasons.
What I can’t decide right now is whether I want to type the story, or handwrite it. I used to always handwrite the first draft with the most colorful pens I own, but who knows if I’m going to want to go through the trouble of typing it up later. Choices, right? LOL
Part of me kind of wishes that my only responsibility was to scrub walls and wash laundry, but I can’t hide behind chores forever. I still have dreams to pursue, goals to accomplish, and a life to rebuild.
NaNoWriMo Day 1: I will write 1000 words.
It will be terrible, rusty, and full of self-doubt, but it will be writing.
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.
I want to try, so that I don’t inadvertently paint the picture that you just move on and live ever after. So, how do I explain how the demands and criticisms pushed me well past the point of discomfort, and landed me in crisis counseling? How does one describe the injuries of abuse that never left any bruises?
Psychological sadism.
I once sat hidden in a car and tearfully told a complete stranger, “I’ve realized that I will never be broken enough.” There was no end goal. No stopping point. It was only ever going to get worse. I couldn’t eat or sleep, and I was fading away. My body couldn’t carry on in that situation.
I only got out because people helped me.
I didn’t put the TV in the front room with the big window of my new place. It feels too exposed and unsafe. I hate how frequently the motion sensor of my doorbell camera goes off, because I don’t like how it makes me feel. I like feeling hidden when I’m at home.
Sometimes I just want to sit and binge watch random shows while doing nothing. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to get up or think. Sometimes ordinary tasks feel like a big accomplishment.
As I’ve been healing, I’ve been realizing how bad it was, and that hurts in a totally different sort of way.
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.
It’s hard to imagine what sort of future I want, especially because the premises of my circumstances keep changing and throwing me for a loop. There are other factors as well, like what I think is realistic, what I can handle, and what I think I deserve.
I don’t think that I have a good grasp of reality. Maybe I am that talented, driven, and lucky. Maybe I’m more like everyone else. I don’t know.
Is there something that I’m meant to be doing?
The weird thing is, I stayed strong in my faith until I had a miracle happen. The sort of, “Whoa, I did not see this coming, and this really helps everything,” sort of miracle. Instead of feeling bolstered, it was like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me. I guess it’s one thing to have faith in complete darkness, but when I started moving towards light with no idea where it was coming from … that’s when it got scary. False hope? A brighter future? I have no idea.
Why would that sort of miracle happen to me anyway?
My body couldn’t take the stress though. I couldn’t sleep or eat, and I lost nearly 20lbs in two months. It left me feeling forced into the next step I took.
Not that I know what I should and shouldn’t share about what’s going on.
As it stands right now in my tiny corner of the world, I need a future. I need to figure out what future I’m aiming for. I need to stop feeling like a 17-year-old staring at high school graduation without the foggiest clue of what’s supposed to come next, especially considering that I’m 20 years past that.
I want to be a writer, but between betrayal trauma and living expenses, I’m just not sure anymore … it seems so unrealistic now.
After all, how many miracles can I expect to get me through?
I have lots of moments throughout the day when I’m overcome with the surreal thought of, “How is this my life?”
I’m not sure how much I should publicly share. Parts of it make me think of the line, “Lawyers clean up all details / since daddy had to lie” from the song End of Innocence by Don Henley, and the title itself feels apt enough.
There are days when it’s easier to lose myself in a list of things that have to be done, and not think about the big picture of what I’m doing. My heart stops every time the doorbell rings, and I wish that this wasn’t my reality.
Events are traveling through the neighborhood grapevine faster than I would have ever expected, but by now I have surrendered my pride and laid everything bare. People are more supportive than I anticipated, and I like how they periodically check in with me. I don’t really care if it’s morbid curiosity or genuine concern, as long as I have people surrounding me through all this.
I still feel hopelessly lost. I keep wondering when that feeling will fade, when something will come together and start to feel solid, but instead everything under my feet keeps crumbling.
And I don’t even know how much I should share, because it’s moved into the legal sphere now.
For all my life, I heard divorce talked about like it was an ending. In reality, it’s a beginning. Sometimes people take it as permission to punish you, to erase you, to make your life as miserable as they can. After all, why should they care? They’ve already moved on to their new partner, and you’re just a loose end and a failure. An object that no longer serves a purpose.
But I’m not.
I will not be erased. I will not surrender my life just because someone thinks that my existence is inconvenient now.
And the legal sphere is where I still have rights and a voice — where my story still matters.
So as much as I wish it had never been pushed this far, as unreal as it feels to be going through these events, I will not surrender. Not with everything that’s at stake.
I’ve been channeling my inner Paula Deen and indulging in Southern comfort foods. Banana pudding and lemon curd pudding? Yes please! Chocolate popcorn, potato salad, beer can chicken (though I used apple juice instead) … It’s feels really good to throw off all concerns about sugar and fat and just indulge in the fuel of life.
Besides, I was never the one who cared about reading ingredient labels anyway.
The weather is nice and I’ve been getting out a fair bit, going on nature walks and identifying bird song using a handy app I downloaded. I like how I have a better understanding of the world around me, not to mention the excitement of hearing a bird that’s marked as “uncommon” or “rare.” My kids and I also keep our eyes out for fish in the river, any other critters that we can spot, and plants that are interesting … I enjoy these excursions quite a bit.
I patched a hole in the back tire of my daughter’s bike. I haven’t done this sort of thing since I was a kid, so it was satisfying when I got the bicycle put back together and it worked … especially with getting the chain back onto the gears, since that was rather tricky for me. I like discovering this inner reserve of handiness that’s gone untapped over all these years, and it’s really boosting my confidence. It’s not that I couldn’t fix things, but rather that I was never allowed to before.
Occasionally, after all of these busy days of outings and improvements, I have days when I feel completely unmotivated to do anything. I’m doing my best to frame these as days of rest, and not judge myself by their existence. I’m rebuilding a lot right now, and it would be unfair to expect myself to keep doing so much every single day.
It is surprisingly hard to write about myself. The internet is full of people who go on and on about the ordinary things that they do, while here I am struggling with summarizing my weekly activities. I don’t believe that I have the “it” factor, so I’m not going to gain any attention through journal entries, but this is something that I want to do for myself. I grew up in a shadow, then married into a different shadow, and now I want to feel like I have the right to shine with my own light. No permission required.
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
And those marks are just a sign of something true you witnessed in your time Of something new, like the start of something fine
As a society, we tend to think of every moment spent on a failed venture as “wasted time.” Wasted potential. Wasted life.
So I remind myself that life doesn’t run a clear course through our external achievements. Every experience, every moment lived, every thought and feeling, is what makes up our lives — it flows through from within.
Yeah, I tried my best and failed catastrophically, but I learned a lot. My internal self grew and evolved. After I’m done licking my wounds and recovering from my disasters, I can get up and try something new. Something better.
You know perfectly well the bravado with which they present themselves to the world — it was the first thing that you saw about them, and probably what drew you to them in the first place. But as time passed by, you began to sense that fragility inside of them. The bragging and exaggerations began to seem more and more like a coping mechanism, to hide how easily they could break inside. There was so much about ordinary life that they couldn’t handle.
And you never wanted to break anyone.
So you helped to maintain their public image. After all, most people were complete strangers that you were likely to never see again, so it would be mean-spirited to demean someone you cared about over an exaggeration. You picked up the slack at home, taking on all the chores and obligations, while they seemed to spend so much time socializing and engaging in leisurely activities. Sometimes you resented them, but their fragility kept you from acting on it; you were the stronger one.
You can’t lash out at someone who’s so weak and vulnerable.
So you endure.
And the more you know them, the more childish they seem. Instead of equal partners, you’re the parent, constantly cleaning their messes and boosting their self-esteem. They even cry out, “Look at me!” and you reply, “Wow, good job!” Only you don’t feel it inside, because you know that they aren’t a child. They aren’t growing, and they won’t ever become anything more than what they are. They don’t take your words of encouragement as motivation to improve — they insist that they’ve reached perfection already. You tell them “good job” because it would break them if you didn’t.
You aren’t a mean person.
They never look at you. They never tell you “good job.” You work hard, you miss sleep, you devote every moment to trying to build them up, and they never seem to notice. On the other hand, they have huge reactions for every moment when you slip — and they extract every last ounce out of you without any forgiveness or leniency. You feel ignored and scrutinized at the same time. You have to be everything in your loneliness, and sometimes you wish that you were a literal robot free from your own emotions. It would be easier if you didn’t feel so much.
But you can’t leave, because they’re so fragile. You imagine them sitting in garbage and mold, wasting away without someone there to care for them. Who else would put up with this person once they learn the truth about them? You aren’t heartless.
You feel like a bad person for thinking that way.
Until the day when they tell you that they’re bored of you. They tell you that you held them back and wasted their life. They tell you that you abused them by being a separate person from them — but inside you know how much of yourself you lost to them. You know how much you sacrificed in trying to protect them from their own fragility.
It hurts. Deeply.
You then learn how many manipulative games they had been playing to keep you off balance. That time when it took them months to make you a copy of the house key, claiming that they kept forgetting because they were busy? Or when they went through that phase of talking in a quiet voice that was difficult to hear, only to insist that they were speaking normally? You begin to wonder if they were secretly hiding dishes then returning them to the drawers and cupboards, just to make you feel like you were losing it when you could never find what you needed. Maybe there was more truth to those paranoid moments of doubt than you realized at the time.
They’ve thrown you away, and you’re left wondering who you really are. You don’t know what’s real anymore, and you’re scared to think anything good about yourself. You feel drained and damaged. You don’t know what you want out of the future.
You learn that it’s called “narcissistic abuse,” and that there are a lot of other people out there who have gone through the same thing. For the first time in a long time, you no longer feel alone.
By Autumn Rain 