Divorce was the scariest word in my vocabulary

Sometimes it takes a village to find your own voice.

For some people I imagine that coming to a major life-changing decision is a mostly solo journey, a deep dive inwards. For me, it took a village to find the courage to leave my long marriage and the life I had known for 33 years. Divorce was the scariest word in my vocabulary and for a long time, I dared not speak its name.

As I shared in the first part of the story of my divorce, I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hear the voice that whispered to me in the middle of the night, ‘Go. You must go.’

It took me a long time to accept that wanting to leave is enough, as

Cheryl Strayed

wrote so beautifully in one of her Dear Sugar columns:

Go, even though you’re afraid of being alone.

Go, even though you’re sure no one will ever love you as well as he does.

Go, even though there is nowhere to go.

Go, even though you don’t know exactly why you can’t stay.

Go, because you want to.

Because wanting to leave is enough.

So when my own voice wasn’t ready to make itself known, not to others, not even to myself, I sought the counsel of my village: my closest friends, teachers, coaches, and therapists.

There was a danger that I was doing what author Brené Brown warns against: “desperately polling people whose opinions are often not relevant. Normally, we just need quiet and stillness so we can hear our own voice. That’s way harder than polling.”

But every one of the inhabitants of my village had wisdom to share, and more often than not, they reflected my own wisdom back to me: the inner wisdom I hadn’t yet learned to trust. They were dropping breadcrumbs along my trail, but only I could find my way.

Here are all the ways I sought the counsel of the inhabitants of my village:

On a grassy lawn in May 2022 across from the Pacific Ocean in Puako on Hawaii’s Big Island, I explored a form of yoga therapy that began to break through the defenses of my guarded heart. As the other women shared stories of their own struggles and triumphs tearfully, vulnerably, in the safe space created by our teacher Michelle Andrie of Ageless Move More, I got braver about sharing my own story. I began to put into words what until then I had only confided in the pages of my journal and to a few of my closest friends.

A month after returning I started a six-week course called The Bigger Yes led by author and teacher

Laura McKowen

. I dove into that course like it was a life raft, which of course it was. During those six weeks, my husband was away. I craved our time apart. I was happier when he was away—another telltale sign that all was not well with our marriage. By the end of The Bigger Yes, the knowing had become a thunderous voice inside I could no longer ignore. It cried and railed inside me, sometimes soft, sometimes pleading, but always there. It told me to gather my courage, overcome my people-pleasing, amiable (“amyable”) ways and speak what was on my heart.

Still, as late spring turned to early summer, I was not ready. I decided to seek mental health therapy. I had not seen a therapist since my early 40s, at another point when the undercurrent of unhappiness in my marriage had broken through the surface. But that therapy was short-lived. I wasn’t ready then. I often wish I had been. For much of the past few years as I have moved closer to making this decision, I have been steeped in regret. I now understand regret is there to teach me something very important: that what I regret the most is what I value the most.

As author Daniel H. Pink, author of The Power of Regret, told Maya Shankar on her podcast:

“We get captured by our regrets. We wallow in them. We ruminate on them. What we should be doing is listening to our regrets, confronting them, using them as signals, as data, as information. When we do that, there are many, many benefits. There's research and social psychology showing that it can help make us better negotiators. It can help us become better problem solvers, better strategists. There's even evidence that it can actually help us deepen the sense of meaning in our lives when we treat this emotion properly and use it as an engine for moving forward.”

So, I turned once again to therapy, more than twenty years later. I first decided to try the online therapy company Better Help and was matched with a female therapist. We had a few sessions but after a few lackluster conversations followed by basic worksheets on assertive communication, positive thinking, and how to use “I” statements in speaking to my spouse, I knew there would barely be a crumb on the trail from her.

It wasn’t until I met S., an experienced clinical psychologist, and we sat down together in the living room of her home where she met private clients that I found the kind of support I was seeking. She encouraged me to “stop being in your head so much. I can see you are exhausted by it and it is making you sad. The questions you are posing are completely legitimate, the desires and needs and wants you have are fully justified. But now it is time for him to answer you. For you to be steady and firm and continue to repeat yourself and ask until you get an answer.”

She encouraged me to go to my wisdom within.

“Listen to my heart,” I offered.

Not quite, she countered. “When you listen to your heart you will be drawn into your early courtship days, raising your children together, the trips you took and places you lived—the happier times—and that will pull on your heart strings. Instead, you need to be listening to your soul, the soul that has been with you your entire life and has all the answers for you. Go deep and get connected to what your soul is telling you to do.”

That evening, I wrote in my journal:

Once you are on a path of relational reckoning, you can’t get back on the path you were on when you were willfully oblivious or willing to stay suspended in your hopes of how things might be different. Now you are very aware of your wants and needs in a relationship and that these are not being met and that this is not okay. And now, you have to make a choice.

Once you know you can’t unknow.”

It was time to have that conversation with my husband. I got out of my head, connected to my soul, summoned my voice and spoke my truth. I stated clearly my needs and wants and desires.

That conversation and subsequent ones over that tense spring and summer did not go as I would have wished—or maybe it was exactly what I was wishing, deep down. He rejected my suggestion of marriage counseling. And as he did, I felt a flush of relief, the sense of a narrow escape. I saw that in making that offer, I was acting once again out of obligation and duty when in fact I already knew what I wanted.

What my therapist had been trying to get me to see—what every teacher along this path had been trying to illuminate for me—is that I had the answers all along.

“Look for the answer inside your question.” —Rumi

Now I had to take the next step, and the next, until the September day I sat across from my husband and said, “I want a divorce.” The moment I said it, all fear of saying it was gone. It was simply the truth. There is such sweet freedom in speaking the truth when it has been tamped down for so long.

And so the story unfolds. There would be months of pain, grief, heartbreak, anger, resentment, and sadness. I would need to summon my courage and wisdom within time and time again. Having run from conflict all my life, there would be no avoiding the difficult conversations now. I would have to clearly and firmly speak my needs and wants over and over again.

But having found my voice, I no longer needed the wisdom of my village.

I was ready to walk my own path home.

Questions for the comments: What is the question you may be afraid to ask yourself? What is your experience of telling the truth in difficult situations? Is it freeing or is it hard (or maybe both?)

Three Songs for 3D

Divorce

“To Live a Life,” First Aid Kit

Then suddenly we wake from this dream that we have made
It beats all at once and then
It slowly fades
I'm raising in
To nothing I
It all falls away
I know it now
For my own sake
That I cannot stay

Dementia

“Changes” by Joy Oladokun

I hate change, but I've come of age
Think I'm finally finding my way
Danced with chaos, every occasion
Looks me up every day

Even when I'm tired and low there is gold in this
River that is carrying me home

Destiny

“You Gotta Be,” Des’ree

Listen as your day unfolds
Challenge what the future holds
Try and keep your head up to the sky
Lovers, they may cause you tears
Go ahead, release your fears
Stand up and be counted
Don't be ashamed to cry