Don't Start Now
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I heard a song today …. Don’t Start Now and it caught my complete attention. It reminded me of how when I told my former spouse that we needed to decouple and transition our marriage into a friendship, he came back and wanted to start being there for me and said that he didn’t want me to leave. The truth is, he had left me more than a decade prior.
The line that struck me was “I’m not where you left me at all.” For me it has two meanings. First, I am not where he left me over a decade ago, not at all. But secondly, I am not where I was when I initiate our divorce.
At the end of the day, it makes little difference whether you initiated your divorce (so much more civilized than you “left” them) or they did. If you did, they had already left you … hence your divorce. If they did, well, they left you.
In either case … I’m not where I was left at the end of a marriage I thought would last forever. I am finally who I truly have been but always felt wasn’t good enough. I am happier than I have ever been in my life. Of course learning to live as a single person after all these collective years of married life has been challenging and in fact continues to be, but it’s so worth it. I finally am my true self and I embrace that, flaws and all. For me, the best I can ever do is the best that I know how to do with the awareness and skills that I have at the time. And as long as I continue to work to improve myself, I will continue to do better and to be happier.
I’ll add the obvious that I don’t really want to live the rest of my life by myself, alone. But at this point, I’d rather be in no relationship than a bad one ever again. I am at peace living on my own. I don’t NEED to be with someone. I want to be with someone, but I don’t need that for my life to be complete. And in that very sentence is incredible power … the loss of being needy for someone. At the end of the day, life is a singular experience, which sometimes can be shared and witnessed by another. And if I haven’t done “the work” to really understand who I am at my core, what I believe, stand for, am willing and unwilling to do, what my values and boundaries are … then I have nothing. If I don’t do the work I will enter the next relationship with the same awareness and skills that resulted in divorce 3 times before. The work is the process of unbecoming all of the generational, familial, cultural and societal expectations and constructs that have been placed on me for decades to the point that I didn’t even know who I truly am. And until I did that work, I had nothing to offer to someone else.
