If I think back to the first year after my divorce, there were several moments where I completely lost it. I don’t mean I cried quietly. I mean I screamed. Why!!??. Why is this happening? Why did it come to this?
Nobody answered. Of course they didn’t. I’m not sure who I was asking.
But since then, I’ve come to know that the word ‘why’ faces backwards. It sends you off into the past to dig around for a reason. And of course you’ll find one, but it changes nothing about what you do tomorrow morning. I know you’re going to ask it anyway. Nobody can stop you. Just don’t stand still waiting for the answer.
Here are the five things I’d hand myself if I could go back to that first week.
The life I’d pictured wasn’t going to happen
I spent a long time living in a future that was never going to arrive.
Twenty-four years is a long time to carry a picture of how things are going to go. Plans get made, the future gets laid out. But you never sit down and draw it. It builds up quietly, until it stops being a hope and becomes just the way things are.
And then suddenly it’s gone, and the mistake I made was that I didn’t put it down. I kept living inside it. Making plans in it. Waiting for real life to line itself back up with it. That kind of lines up with a divorced man wanting to get back to the way he was. It doesn’t work that way.
The anxiety in that year was enormous, one of the most stressful things I’ve dealt with, and I assumed it was the divorce. But really, most of it was the gap. I was measuring every single day against a life that wasn’t coming back, so every single day I came up short.
So, if you’ve got that knot in your stomach, ask yourself what picture you’re still holding. Be specific about it. Where you thought you’d be, who with, what the later years looked like. You don’t have to bin it today. It was a good picture. Just stop using it as the standard for the life you’re actually in.
Now what?, and being alone
This question turns up somewhere in the first few months, usually late and usually quiet. Now what? And nobody hands you a next step.
Before it all happened, I’d have told you I’d be fine on my own. I wasn’t. Not even close. It got into a lot of parts of my life, and not all at once; it crept in quietly.
I had the idea that being alone was something you gritted your teeth and got through by yourself. Before my divorce, I’d never had anyone I could be properly honest with. Later I found men’s groups, places where sharing is welcome, in a group and one-to-one, and that changed how the alone felt.
Now what doesn’t need a big answer. It took me far too long to see that. You don’t need a five-year plan. You need to know what to do with this evening.
Dropping the blame
This is the one I feel most strongly about.
I was hard on my ex. Most men are, and I understand why. I think it goes both ways, actually. When something this big falls apart, your mind goes looking for somebody to hold responsible, because the alternative is harder to sit with. Someone has to be to blame, right? The alternative is that it came from lots of small things over a long time. Almost always, it’s a death by a thousand cuts.
Here’s where I’ve landed. No one is to blame. Things happened, and they happened for reasons, and most of those reasons could have been dealt with years earlier. They weren’t. That’s the way it goes. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. But didn’t.
Blaming is toxic, mostly to the man doing it. A man who’s holding on to blame is still in the marriage. He’s still arguing the case, on his own, in his own head, with nobody there to argue back.
Be careful how you hear this. Dropping the blame doesn’t mean what happened was fine. If you were treated badly, you don’t have to pretend otherwise. What costs you is the case you rebuild in your head every day.
Simple test. Think about her for a minute and notice what your body does. If your jaw tightens, you’re still holding it.
Being comfortable not knowing
I couldn’t stand not knowing what was coming, so I did the worst possible thing. I stopped. If I couldn’t see where the path went, I wasn’t taking a step. I was so uncertain of my judgement that it effectively paralysed me.
Nobody knows. I’d assumed every other man had a rough idea of what came next, and I’d missed the memo. Now I know that nobody gets handed a map. It has to get hacked out of the jungle as we go.
But you can say ‘I don’t know what’s next,’ leave it there, and go and make dinner. The not knowing gets quieter once you stop fighting it. But sitting with it isn’t the same as stopping. You only ever need the next step. Just one.
What’s in front of you
My head spent that year in two places. The past, going over it again. All the things I should have done instead. Lots of regret during that time. And the future, both the one I’d lost and the one I was dreading. I was hardly ever in the actual day.
A life is huge. You can’t hold it. A day has a size to it. This morning. The next hour. A cup of tea, an email, a walk to the end of the road.
When your head runs off, and it will, ask what’s in front of me right now, and do that. It’s not some clever trick or rocket science. It’s one small thing, which is why it works when nothing big does. Keeping it small makes it easy to see it being done and not getting overwhelmed by a massive task.
The one idea underneath all five
Here they are again.
The picture I was living in.
The need for someone to blame.
The rule that said I should know what’s next.
The idea that struggling alone meant something was wrong with me.
Focus on what’s in front of you.
Every one of them is a view I was holding. And not one of them was helping me.
So look at what you’re clinging to. There’s a belief in there somewhere that isn’t doing you any good, and you’ve held it long enough that it stopped feeling like a belief at all. It just feels like how things are.
You don’t need to argue yourself out of it. You only need to ask whether it’s getting you anywhere. If the honest answer is no, you’re allowed to put it down. That doesn’t betray anything.
I didn’t work any of this out in one go. It came slowly, with plenty of backwards steps, and there are bits I’m still working on. Pick the one of the five that made your stomach drop a bit. That’s probably the one you’re holding.
If you’re not sure where you actually are in your own rebuild, the Which One? quiz will give you a picture of it in a few minutes. Take it here: https://www.treeoflifejourney.co.za/which-one