Truth, lies, and brokenness

After I knew I was leaving my marriage, after I had told him, but before I figured out what the coming weeks and years would look like, I tried to start to heal. Healing when you're living in the thing that broke you is...challenging. I kept two jars on my desk, one tied with twine, open at the top, and labeled "truths," the other covered in dark tape so I couldn't see inside it, with just a narrow opening at the top, labeled "lies." I spent the weeks quickly filling those jars with tiny folded pieces of paper that told the story of how utterly broken I was by the emptiness that was my marriage.

Truths

"I deserve to be happy." "My children will understand one day." "We will be okay." "I am loveable."

Lies

"This is all my fault." "I am destroying my children." "I am unlovable." 

Sometime around this time, I began reading Glennon Doyle's book "Untamed." I had no idea how much I needed it. I have since owned at least three copies. My current copy is annotated, underlined, dog-eared and well-loved. Each time I read it, I resonate with a different part of its wisdom. 

In this current iteration, her words on brokenness are whispering to me. The jars have found their way back and I haven't felt this broken in a really long time. In a passage about her sister's grief, she says "If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled. You are whole again, and strong, but you are suddenly a new shape, a new size. The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain - whether it's a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a carryon of grief lasting decades - it's revolutionary. When that kind of transformation happens, it becomes impossible to fit into your old conversations or relationships or patterns or thoughts or life anymore."


Like my beloved mountain rivers, you can never step in the same one twice. Once you are broken, even when you have healed, you are different. 

I didn't want that life back. It had died its death and I could live with that. But I had a version of the best parts of it, time in Colorado, a decent relationship with my kids' father, an understanding that it wasn't me that he didn't love, he just didn't really love in a way the kids and I needed to feel it. I came to a place pf acceptance for the things I could not change because I'd walked away from those things with no other choice.

And now I'm seeing how much I am not the same person and cannot return to the same river. This was a race weekend. Until last year, I have spent this weekend since 2017 navigating trailhead roads in the middle of the night, carrying a red, squeaky gear back, pounding Red Bull, and in recent years, napping in the car surrounded by my children and our dogs while we waited for our runner to appear. It was really hard to skip it this year, but too much has changed. Like my Colorado mountain home with all its furnishings hand-picked by me, now enjoyed by them, this race is no longer any part mine (or my children's). It's not the same river and it never will be. The last two months of discovery, uncovering secrets and learning what is real, enlightened me to too much to go back to Colorado, to pretend I have any sort relationship with my children's father, or to believe the stories I told myself about my value in that relationship, then or now. He certainly knows how to love. He just stopped loving me.

But Glennon says, "Sometimes to live again, we have to let ourselves die completely. We have to let ourselves become completely, utterly new." I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself into forgetting all of the memories I can no longer look upon fondly. Those are simply losses now. They belong in the "lies." jar.  I'm trying to let myself die so I can live again, but it's taking SO LONG. 

I'm sure I will resurface some day. I'm sure I won't always avoid my friends and I'm sure I won't cry every time someone innocently asks how I am. I'm sure I'll look back and see how this absolute brokenness builds something new and wonderful. But for now, I'm tired of sitting with it. This metamorphosis is dark and uncomfortable and I want to get back to the living. I'm adding that to the truth jar. Sometimes it's hard to know what is truth and what are lies. 


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