Grieving Who I Was and Was Supposed to Be

The D word, divorce, drew grief out of me in waves-sometimes expected and other times unexpected.

I believed our love would conquer all when we got married.  I knew I could do anything I put my mind to, believing in myself as a fixer and healer, while failing to factor in another person’s role in that.  I sincerely believed whatever problems we had we could couples therapy our way out.

When I love, I love deeply and hard.  I go all in.  I’m committed.  I was committed to my husband the entirety of our marriage regardless of its state.

Several astrologers had predicted divorce on my patrika (my astrological map).  I didn’t want to believe my fate and when I had a broken engagement about a month before meeting my former husband, my grandmother, mother, and I decided that’s what was on my map…the divorce was my broken engagement.

A lot of things are “just not done” in my culture, at least as taught and modeled to me by my family.  Divorce was one of them.  Every aunt and uncle in my family was married until death.  Were they happy?  I don’t think so.  Did they have healthy relationships?  I doubt it.

In fact, I went into a deep depression in my twenties having an existential crisis of the mediocrity and impending doom of life.  That I was doomed to be like all of them.  Ironically I did take eerily similar steps towards this doomed fate, but tore myself away from that path when I decided to remove myself and my children out of an unhealthy and unsafe environment.  I did this without the suggestion of my parents.  I’m not sure they could fully process the darkness of it all because Indian aunties and uncles have a difficult time wrapping their heads around things that don’t look so hot on paper.

There was a month during my separation and divorce process when I thought I needed SSRIs, but the reality is my whole identity was being ripped to shreds.  I wasn’t that kind of person-who got a divorce.  Divorce wasn’t an option and yet here I was in the middle of one.  I didn’t go on pills, thankfully.  I allowed the shock of who I was and was becoming course through my system.  I cried a lot on and off.  Sometimes for twenty minutes, sometimes for twenty seconds.

I still cry sometimes.  Today I cry grieving the girl I was.  Hopeful, naive, trapped.

I’m not her anymore.

I’m free.  I’m alone.  I’m happy.