“Is he taking good care of my Ruby?” she asks over lunch. I smile big, blush. Tell her about my support network. How I’ve started to reach out. How people have been asking me how I’m doing lately and I’ve been telling them.
“I’m great.”
Spent the week selling myself at job interviews and to potential roommates. Threw my hands in the air when I landed the apartment in Green Lake. Sent a text to notify my partner and best friends when my first job offer came in.
My feet finally under me. I’m coming home again.
We decide what we want to sculpt. Take a step back and examine it all. What is it that we want from each other? From ourselves. Start building a life with all the pieces we selected carefully. Leave nothing to just fall into place. This is all intentional.
While we walk down the street he reaches over and grabs my hand. Laces fingers. Pulls me closer to him and kisses my cheek. Partners. Support. We stare off in the same direction. We lean hard on each other and we take turns being the weaker one. Know when it’s our time to be strong. Give and take. We’re a team.
Mark tells me I don’t need to come to therapy anymore. That we don’t have much to talk about. We’re just hanging out. And I start to sink into the idea that this isn’t just an upswing. This is sustainable. I’ve learned how to be okay.
Back at lunch we reminisce about last year. When I had to leave my job. The city. When everything started to crumble, fall down. And we smile big and shake our heads. It feels so long ago now. So far away. It’s the quiet shadow of a memory. Alive only because we talk about it every now and then. And I’m never going back there. Wouldn’t even remember my way. This is normal. This is me. I am safe.
He asks if I’ve been writing. I respond the same way I have every time someone has asked me since January, “No, but I really should. No, but I’d like to.” As if it is just a thing I can add to my list and cross off when I come to it. Nestle it down in between reworking an entire business and trips to Seattle on the weekends. Tack it on to the end of an already existent line of tasks to be completed. Make time for it in between planning a divorce celebration and figuring out where the hell we go from here.
It’s not like that. It’s more like putting all that down and unearthing something completely different. Because if I start writing, I’m going to write about Mason. And if I do that…
Everything aches. I do a good job with blocking, with dealing, with harnessing all that heartbreak into motivation. My mental health professionals, my friends, my family, they all remark on how well I’ve been doing “all things considered”, but they neglect to consider writing. Because if I haven’t written about it, I haven’t done much of anything with it.
So let’s do something with it.
I made him say the word. The big, scary one with the sharp edges. I made him say “divorce” before I would acknowledge what he was saying. It meant all my fighting hadn’t been enough to keep him. That talks about how I would change, how we could change hadn’t been convincing enough to sway him. That I’d failed irreparably at the one thing in my life I wanted to be good at: being married to Mason. I’d lost him. Curtain falls.
Sitting on the steps of the once-ours, now-his apartment building I sobbed for a solid hour. In the days following every mention of future plans, of children, of growth, of building something brought me to tears. Nothing was beautiful without him. This is not the life I had wanted to live. Over and over in therapy those words would be repeated, “You didn’t ask for this. This was not your plan.” And despite all my resistance, I finally gave into the feeling that it’s different being left than leaving.
Here I was–handed something I had no desire for–being told, “This is what you get.” It happens all the time, I know. But my partner was supposed to be my constant and he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.
The urge was strong to hate him. To vilify. Instead, I pulled out all the reasons getting divorced was the right thing for both of us. I told myself that this was good, was better. That the trees that grow back after the fire are stronger than the ones before. Then I remembered that when we first met he called me “wildfire” and I break down again. Break down. Then continue on again.
Most every morning I get out of bed and I smile in the mirror and I begin my day with confidence. And we plan a party to celebrate the end of one chapter, the beginning of the next. I even buy a new dress. Mostly things feel just fine. We joke about June 15th being the best day of my life.
But you don’t just turn off love like that. Don’t just turn the wheel and plot a new path. I sewed him into every fiber of my life. And though we know I shouldn’t have, I still have to go back. Go back and pull out each stitch made in the last five years. It will leave a hole there. There is no fixing it.
In time I won’t notice it as much. As we get more chapters in our book each one seems less significant alone. And in time I will stop checking my phone and email, hoping he’s tried to make contact. I will stop missing him at family dinners and stop reaching across the bed for him in the middle of the night. Eventually I will stop thinking of how to tell him first when something exciting happens. Before I know it, he will fade off into the edges. But that won’t change the fact that I never wanted this.
That I still don’t. Not this. And–you know what?–I didn’t even know that until I wrote it.
Yet this is where I am. Standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the most important people in my life. We problem solve and take measurements. Smooth the edges of each piece of clay. Learn a new trade like the curves of a new lover’s body. And I think, “This is it, kid. This is your constant now.”
As we became closer I began to notice that she didn’t feel perfect. She felt shunned by a few co-workers, pressured by her managers, and wasn’t enjoying our work environment. Everyone has these experiences so it made her more human to me. Yet she still looked pretty perfect and I loved being around her and her light.
Recently we went out for lunch. It was one of those catch-up ones where you try to condense four months of living into one hour. Near the end she asked, “How do you do it? You’re always upbeat and you’ve got your stuff together.”
I laughed and said to her, “It’s the drugs.”
My laughing remark became serious as I saw the effect it had on her. Then I had to confess. I told her it’s a lot of therapy and occasionally a pill I’ve been prescribed to help me let go of the anxiety and focus on the lessons learnt in therapy. I told her I adore the psychologist I work with. That her goal on day one was to see less of me and give me the tools to fight my anxiety on my own. I told her I went from multiple sessions a week to visiting my psychologist a few times a year when my tools need sharpening. I offered to send my friend her contact information.
Then it was her turn. She told me she’s been suffering with body dysmorphic disorder since her early teens. Everyone compliments her body, her style, her life, but she feels that she’s barely hanging on. She’s in a committed relationship but confessed , “He didn’t fall in love with me. He fell in love with the girl I pretended to be, not some sick woman.”
Listening to her I knew how she felt. The gift of mental illness is that we can wear a mask so beautiful that it fools the world. So people look at us and think,”She has it all!”
To be honest, I usually don’t mind people thinking that. Today I’m clear so I can see that I have a lot. Can I improve? Yes! What’s the point of life if you can’t improve and learn and grow. Does this room for growth mean that I’m rather incompetent and only making it through by faking it? Not at all.
On days when I’m less clear it comes crashing down. Every mistake is an emergency failure. I’m not really successful I’m just some talented fraud who will be found out at any moment.
I know I’m not alone and unfortunately my friend was honestly hoping for a secret that could help her. Some trick I’ve got to great mental health. My only trick, which has come from therapy, is to attempt to recognize when I’m engaging in distorted thinking and immerse myself in the truth.
The mask I mentioned, well it’s interesting. As we’re busy fooling the world, we’re also fooling ourselves. We really are the strong, fashionable, smart women we’re pretending to be, but the masks are on firmly. When when we take them off we don’t recognize that the faces in the mirror are even more beautiful. The faces behind the masks are everything in the masks, but so much more. The face have seen darkness, survived, and continue to battle. We are warriors.
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youmeanme is the pen name of a millennial blogger who is blogging her journey out of debt on Saving without Scrimping. She has been battling anxiety and depression for the last twenty years and is learning to cherish each day as a victory.
Would you like to have your work featured on this blog? Send an email to rubyabrowne[at]gmail.com.
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