Here
“I missed Paul. I missed my life. But I didn’t want to go back to it either… I realized that what I’d started when I’d spoken those words hadn’t only led me to my divorce but to this: to me sitting alone in Old Station, California, on a picnic table beneath the magnificent sky. I didn’t feel sad or happy. I didn’t feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I’d done wrong, in getting myself here, I’d done right.”
- Cheryl Strayed, Wild
I read those words on a flight to Detroit last week. I was starting a new job. Part of my new life post-divorce. Part of a whole slew of things ‘new.’ And I so fully understood what Cheryl Strayed meant, I found myself crying as I faced the sunset through the airplane window.
This, mind you, was before the flight attendants even made the rounds with the drink cart. I couldn’t blame cheap airline Chardonnay.
Nope.
This was all me.
And I realized it was a good thing. I feel things deeply. Sometimes that’s a blessing. Sometimes it’s a brutal curse. I feel whether or not those around me feel as well. In the midst of my divorce, that was maddening. How could people be worrying about assets and signing here, there, and everywhere when, in my world, the sky was falling?
But in the wake of it? I truly believe the lows are as much a blessing as the highs. As keenly as I feel hurt, I feel joy. I suffered the loss of everything I thought I’d worked for, only to find that the real fruit of my labor was not only intact, but just beginning to grow. Some hurts take an excruciatingly long time to heal. Still, one day you wake up to only a scar. It’s fresh and new and alien and not quite a part of you yet, but you also can’t quite recall what lay beneath only a short time before. You sure as hell don’t worry about it.
My life is no longer just post-divorce. It is pre-something. Something I haven’t even discovered yet.
I understand why a woman would walk more than a thousand miles alone through the wilderness just to get past something that lies nowhere on the trail. I’ve done it myself, though in different boots, with different wounds. Many of us have.
And we may miss what we left behind, but we know we did right in moving forward.
