4.

There were lots of good days, too, as strange as that sounds. Parts of me felt free and excited at the possibilities of the future. Could I thrive in my job now? Was writing coming more easily to me? Could I finally start chasing dreams with this weight off of me? But an all-too-frequent visitor often took me as one of its victims, too. Guilt was a familiar face as I knew him most of my life. He robbed me of some of the greatest parts of my childhood. To make matters worse, Guilt was so horribly punctual, ruining a rare hopeful moment and ripping it away as if I didn’t deserve it and as if it wasn’t mine to have in the first place.

I know my ex-husband had moments where he thought I didn’t deserve the good moments. He was also in pain. He was also hurting. How could I abandon him in that? I often heard his voice in the back of my head: So, you’re just giving up on us? Just like that?

This guilt came from a lifetime of sacrificing myself to earn love. I truly was a codependent, through and through, something my mother will admit she accidentally taught me growing up. While it’s not her fault, we all know that one of the most tragic, beautiful parts of the brain is our own pattern recognition, even at a young age. We notice when people give us love or praise or affection, why or how we earned it in the first place, and then repeating the behaviors to maintain that love, as if that is how love actually worked in the first place. It’s a learned behavior. I learned it from her. She learned it from someone else, too.

But my ex-husband and I had no idea how badly we had attached ourselves to each other throughout our relationship. We slowly lost our own identities because we thought a relationship meant having to sacrifice parts of ourselves. We had no idea how to thrive independently or autonomously. And that loss of self didn’t happen overnight either. It was months before we both woke up and recognized the person we had committed our entire lives to didn’t exist anymore. It no longer became about if we would part ways, but when.

I avoided home often. As much as home was a safe place for me normally, I no longer felt the guarantee of protection I once did. Loneliness and Guilt continued to creep in the cracks of my house, like mice do. I had no choice but to sit with them when they caught me in my most vulnerable moments, often at night when all the world was asleep.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had considered letting him come home. That loneliness and that guilt were so crippling in some moments, I thought I was drowning. I would cry in the car, in the shower, in the middle of the night. I would cry lying in that empty king size bed, curled up in the tiniest corner of the mattress as if the emptiness was contagious.

The very thing that stopped me from calling him to come home was realizing I had never learned how to sit with these feelings. I was always so concerned with making them go away that I had no idea I could choose anything other than the pits of self-medicating. I owed it to myself and to my emotions to process it all. To feel. Numbing out was really just suffocating me. It only made me explosive, like a grenade waiting to go off, taking anyone within arm’s reach as collateral damage.

The emotions were heavy. Sometimes felt heavier than I could carry.

My friend would tell me in those heavy moments late at night to simply sleep. She said that, often, these feelings don’t roll into the early hours of the morning. That these feelings are like vampires, unable to handle the exposure of daytime like they do at night.

So, I did exactly that. I would finally sleep. And then wake up, a little less lonely and little less guilty. I would get up, look in the mirror, and it wasn’t until a few weeks of this had gone by, I had realized I wasn’t repulsed by my reflection as I once was. I even started to recognize myself again. That was all the momentum I needed at that moment. It didn’t matter that I had hard nights or anxiety or that sometimes I wanted to give in and take it all back and beg him to come home. It mattered that even in those horrible, debilitating moments that for the first time, I was staying true to myself. That I was showing up for me, honoring me.

“Today is going to be a good day,” I would say to my reflection.

The best part? I started to believe it, too.