An Incident Seeking a Witness

Marveling at the power of time on my birthday eve.

Last fall, a surprising thing happened.

I don't want to be explicit about what the thing that happened was. The specifics aren't important, but it was related to one of my most significant life changes, which began in 2016. There are so many incommunicable things about experiencing a divorce. In the very early days, when I mentioned to people that I was getting divorced, the divorced women I met gave me a particular look. I learned to recognize it. I’ve since given it myself, to others. It wasn't something that could be transmitted in words. It was a shared knowledge, a look exchanged between those who had been initiated, whether by their own power or by force, into a sacred liturgy.

One part of being divorced is the way you can become a keeper of secrets. The secrets may not even be accurate in an objective sense; everyone in a divorce has a perspective. I am sure that my perspective as the person who left is very different from the perspective of the person being left. This is not to imply that one is harder or easier. My experience resulted in an emotional apocalypse that tore my whole personhood back to the support beams. I'm sure my ex remembers different horrors. If the two people in the split are striving together against acrimony, a sort of unspoken agreement takes place: certain things won't be said. I have reams of writing on divorce that will never be shared, because my own ethical boundaries mean I am not comfortable being more transparent. There are possible missiles in desert silos on both sides, and I’m not even sure anymore what the weapons aimed at me might be.

In the first year of my divorce, when I first resisted the idea of telling it all, a friend asked why I was protecting my ex. I wasn't protecting my ex. I was protecting my peace. Not everything needs to be shared with the world, even when you're a writer, even when you're a writer whose career was built on a willingness — even a commitment — to be personal and revealing. Living with a person, especially living with a person with whom you are monogamous (and with whom you expected to spend the rest of your life, maybe) is a chillingly intimate experience. You can save some privacy, but so much of you will be visible that is rarely seen by anyone else. Creating a separation from such a person sounds like tearing flesh, and it smells like a chemical fire. The understanding that the person with whom you shared so much will now be out in the wind, possessing many of your hidden and embarrassing truths, with neither law nor loyalty binding their tongue any longer… that's a fear very difficult to articulate. It’s difficult even to know if the threat is valid or imaginary.

So you become secret keepers, even in division, even in betrayal.

The aforementioned thing I experienced led me to look backward in a way I hadn't yet done, despite my proclivity for processing my past. The first part of the experience featured a long-sought validation I hadn't known I’d needed; without warning, I heard myself wailing, animal-like — screaming and crying, a leviathan of grief rushing to the surface. It felt like a purging of the final dregs of anguish that had been lurking in the back of my mind for many years.

But then I felt a tremendous sensation of becoming unburdened. Because almost as quickly, I realized everything I went through at that time has lost so much of its power over me. I am a very different person today, and I had not realized exactly how far I’d come, until now.

I had a long marriage – the divorce judge even commented on it at the hearing, as though the length of time that two people have spent being unhappy together somehow means the decision to divorce is extra tragic, when the real tragedy is that the unhappiness happened at all. So yes, it was a long time. When I was first divorced, I felt such despair over the time I'd “lost” — it felt like a massive casualty, like I’d burned down a portion of my precious and limited life, because I didn’t know I could have changed things until I was so desperate that the options became change, or die.

I only occasionally think about my ended marriage now; instead, all the other things I did in those years have moved to the forefront. The marriage is, increasingly, a footnote, something that appears as an attachment to certain memories, but no longer as a central feature. I think about the longer-term consequences of it all — the faded scars — slightly more often, but even then, it's far less than I expected to do, and only in the context of my own explosive growth, a context that I could not have anticipated. I never think about my ex as an individual living a life somewhere in the world. I don't wonder. I don't Google. I am not haunted by ghosts. This person has no meaning for me now, and I don’t say that with anger or hate, but as a very gentle, very simple fact. When I was first divorced, it felt bizarre and even illogical to just abruptly end contact with someone I’d shared so much of my life with. But that’s what happened. And sure enough, what once connected us withered and vanished. I assume my ex has changed as well, and I don't feel any need to know anything about that.

Experiencing that unnamed thing last fall — it made me realize how much real distance lies between me and the previous iteration of me. I'm not a whole new person, because I carry with me the collected impact of the sum of my life. But I have lost a lot of old cells in the meantime, such that the person I was feels like a distant relative. I love her, and I value her, but she is not me, and I am several iterations past her now. I don’t know what we’d even have to talk about.

Tomorrow is my 48th birthday. My gift to myself, I suppose, is to crack open the door to this room that I rarely invite anyone into, and share some of this with you, for a moment – let you look inside the spaces that don’t get much light. I've never been prouder of the person that I have worked to become, and fought to become. I've never been wiser about myself and my choices. I’ve never had such confidence in my ability to figure things out. I am indefatigable, I am crush-proof, I am relentless. The years go on and I only get stronger. Bad things happen and I keep going until I barely remember how bad those things were. Bad things happen and I give them value, build on them with new bricks. This is how I want to age, increasingly positive that time will keep making me more vivid, more bright. That my light will never go out.