Dank Submission: A Divorce Diary

Nearly fourteen months have passed since the day my world began crumbling. Four-hundred-twenty-four mornings of opening my eyes to the bewildering anxiety of an uncertain future, and damn, if it doesn't feel like I am still standing on the starting line—though my father insists I've grown by leaps and bounds. He's not wrong. The movement took me from a place of disavowing grief through the land of pitiless rage and, finally, to the here and now—same warzone, but mentally and emotionally, a different soldier. Not one breakup experienced in my almost forty years on earth saw me leave the same woman that arrived. But, this one—this one broke more than my heart. It broke me. The shattering started in the chest, but after six months, every inch of me felt spiderweb-cracked. That wasn't even the cataclysm, though. What’s worse is that I allowed the person shattering me a front-row seat to my despair. I let him watch me fall apart, and then, I allowed his scrutiny of my futile attempts to put myself back together again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Any attempt I made to healthily rebuild was executed in vain, and seldomly so. In some perverse way, I enjoyed sitting on my hands in the unlit basement of my mind for months on end. But there were flashes of clarity during the lengthy dissolution of my marriage, though short-lived and always met by my husband's passive-aggressive decorum. Without lifting a finger or leaving a trace of physical evidence, he knocked the proverbial pieces of me right out of my hands as I worked to glue myself back, never intending for me to move on from our relationship peacefully, nor in one piece. Such outcome, too much for him to handle, I’m afraid. After all, we're talking about a man who only seems motivated for a high summit climb if the hikers beside him crumble, creating a Talus slope that makes his ascension less steep. Not only a sucker for instant gratification, the guy is a stickler for taking the easy way out.  And while  your partner takes a photo when you're passed out drunk so the next day you both get a laugh before erasing the proof, my man documented those far-from-finer moments, then showed my parents, his parents, and his friend circle—a union from which he executively excluded me.

I admit that I aired our dirty laundry on a weblog. In retrospect, some things I posted reaffirm that hurt people hurt people. In both full disclosure and my own defense, I wrote the messy details of my impending divorce on a public forum to voice my narrative, not to turn people against my ex. Well, maybe there was a glimmer of hope my words might turn her against him, but I looked at that as a life preserver tossed in her direction. The girl was treading into deep and murky waters despite a blissful ignorance. And that circle of friends he kept—the lot stayed privy only to the blasphemy he rapped until he ultimately began believing his delusions. Today, I know other's opinions of me, whether built on heresy or hard facts, are none of my business. So, if you're reading this, I translated a wild experience into something fit for mass consumption. Yeah, I'm typing the introduction right now, but I don't typically have an end game. Yes, my therapist is aware of this defect in my character; work-in-progress.

Anyway. Thanksgiving, I knew with unyielding conviction  it was time to seize fighting for my husband's love and start writing about the battle instead. But I still needed to figure out why I might chronicle in ink the most prolonged breakup of my life in the first place. Then, on Christmas Eve—the second since the genesis of the unraveling, I found myself at a remarkable precipice; I could either continue chaotic combat or humbly wave the white flag and walk away. Thankfully, nothing screams primetime for necessary change in this gal's ear louder than the archaic yet immutable human practice of calendrical measuring of time in the name of illusory control. New year, new narrative, right?

Well, not exactly. It's February, and I'm just now hitting the keyboard because although I know that time is boundlessly fleeting, thus life ephemeral, I procrastinate like it's my job. Mainly, I put off doing things that, if given my best execution, almost guarantee substantial life enrichment. But here's the thing, dear reader: I wasn't always like this. This isn't who I am. Ten years ago, I lived independently and unapologetically—a headstrong hustler since I could walk and talk. Those who knew me before the nine-year marriage to a master manipulator, never said they’d find me dead next to my killer unless I took him out first.

So, how did I end up breaking into a dank submission?

I sank to the bottom willingly, simple as that. 

Finding my way back to me, however,  proved far more complicated.