Ok, I will immediately know if my readers are Harry Potter fans with that headline.
My divorce was finalized a few days ago. The weeks of me doing the work of an attorney and listening to my ex-husband complain about every damn detail of the process are finally over. Even though it was sad to realize that after fifteen years married and over twenty-two years together that we were no longer officially a couple, my overwhelming emotion was just relief.
I had come across old journals from earlier in our relationship and saw the stark pattern of his relapses into his addiction behaviors. I saw the anguish I poured into the pages asking why he continued to hurt me if he loved me like he said. I saw the fragile hope that “this time things would end up differently”. Finalizing the divorce gave me relief knowing that I would never be going back on that merry-go-round.
Now comes the healing from the years of dealing with his narcissism, his addiction, his harsh and critical comments to me. I know there’s a lot of work that I need to do for myself. Some of it will be pleasant; some of it will be hard. I know that it will require me to deal with emotions and y’all know that I am not so good at that.
But there is also a freedom I now possess that is both exhilarating and a little scary. I suddenly have no one to answer to. And unlike how I was in college, I’m allegedly an adult now. I have to make my own decisions about everything now, both for trivial as well as monumental aspects of my life. Where am I going to live once the condo sells? What kind of place do I want to live in next? How will I decorate my new place? Where will I go on my next vacation? What kind of car insurance will I buy? Who will take care of me if I ever have to have another surgery? What will I make for dinner tonight? Should I talk to the attractive man over there? Who should I make the executor of my will now? Who else should I delete off social media? Do I try online dating?
It’s going to be quite a change from the decades of pretty much doing 90% of what my spouse wanted to do. I get to focus on me and my needs and wishes exclusively! On the other hand, the decisions I will need to make seem endless and now there is no one to help share the mental burden. As an only child, I now have just my mom as immediate family. I’m really fortunate to have a group of close friends (made much closer by my recent upheaval) to lean on. But I can’t exhaust their goodwill by badgering them about what I should do for every detail of my new life either.
These first few days after my divorce being finalized have been very interesting thinking about both what I’ve left behind and what’s ahead. For the past two months, I’ve been so focused on getting through each day, each task on the to-do list to get me past that finish line that I really hadn’t had the headspace to take in the bigger picture. Now that I have a chance to take a step back, I’m realizing that the picture is far more vast than I ever imagined.