Keep Fighting.

I lost a friend over the weekend. Her death is hitting me harder than I might have imagined. I hadn't seen her in person since probably 1999, but we were in a lot of activities together in high school and sat next to each other in a few classes, and we'd reconnected on facebook in recent years. She was brilliant and hilarious and totally marched to the beat of her own drum. She also openly battled depression and addiction, and had recently gotten out of a decade-long abusive marriage to a narcissist. No one has all of the facts, but according to posts from those closest to her, she was found unresponsive last week and taken off life support on Friday.

She was one of the strongest people I'd ever met. The things she'd been through were things I can't even imagine, and she was a survivor in the truest sense of the word. Her vulnerability and openness inspired everyone around her to open up to her and share our secrets.

I realized tonight that that's why her passing is weighing on me so heavily: Emily was the first person I told about the darkness inside my marriage. She had been posting things on facebook a few years back about dealing with her husband's abuse and the depression she felt as a result, and I messaged her privately to say "I'm dealing with the same and also trying to figure out how to leave." I hadn't told anyone up to that point. Even my family and very best friends didn't know how bad things were. But I confided in Emily because she was there, too. I wanted her to know she wasn't alone, and her willingness to share made me realize that I might not be alone, either.

Because she allowed me to share what I was afraid to admit, even to myself, she helped spur me to action. I knew once I told her that I had to do something about my marriage. Even after I messaged her, I stayed in my marriage, trying to fix it, for another year. My messages to her held me accountable to myself. I kept thinking back to how I'd told someone how bad it was, and yet here I was, still in it.

I eventually got out. She did, too, in January of this year, and I was so proud of her. I felt like we were part of a club that only those who'd also been through it could understand. I was convinced that life was going to get better for her, and she just needed to sit with the pain, breathe and cry through it and keep healing. She won custody and moved into her own house with her two young boys, she'd just gotten a new job--I thought that things were finally on the upswing and I was so happy for her. But instead, we lost a beautiful, talented, loving, witty, brilliant member of the club.

Emily allowed us all to be our truest selves. She never judged, because no matter what it was, she'd been there, and even if she hadn't, she had empathy. She epitomized what I think is all of our mission in life: to share openly and vulnerably and to help others realize that they are not alone.

Thank you for holding a space for me, beautiful. You helped me get out of my marriage, more than I even realized until tonight. I'd like to think I helped you, too, but I don't think I did enough. I wish I could have done more. Your light went out way too soon, but I hope that your two gorgeous sons grow up to be just like you.

To anyone reading this: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Many of us have been through it. Your life makes a difference. Keep fighting.

Well, that was fast...

My lawyer works at superhuman speeds. She just emailed me letting me know that she filed my divorce petition with the state. And upon receiving the email, and the attached document listing "my name vs. his name", I promptly began to sob at my desk...it's not even a desk, actually. It's a spot at a table in an open-concept office. So I sobbed at my spot, in the middle of everyone.

It's the right thing. My brain knows it's the right move, and the only way to be happy again, eventually, down the line. But my heart hurts. My heart never wanted this.

I didn't marry him because I wanted it all to go down in a ball of flames. I wanted him to be who I thought he was, who I knew he could be. I wanted the life I thought we'd have. I thought he was IT for me, and I thought we'd be so happy. I wanted a life and a family with him. I wanted to share everything and make memories with him and grow old together. I fought for that, as hard as I could, for as long as I could.

But it never happened. Reality never matched up with how I thought things would be. And giving up on that hope has been the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I had so much hope. But there was only so much pain and sadness I could stand, and only so long I could wait.

I tried to call him tonight to let him know that the papers were filed on my end. He didn't answer. Just like he hasn't answered the last two times I've tried to call him. It's for the best, because the first two times I tried I really wanted him to talk me out of it. I was waiting to file for divorce until I was SURE there was no way for us to fix things. But he was too busy to talk to me, just like he always has been, and each day we didn't talk, I got stronger. And I realized that each time he was too busy for me, he reminded me of my place in his life. I never came first, and I never would. He never wanted to hear about my feelings. 

So thank you, husband, for ignoring my calls and my attempts to talk to you. You got what you wanted. You lost me, and now you'll never have to hear about my pesky feelings ever again. 

To my husband:

I wish you hadn't been too busy with friends and appearances and events to talk to me the last few weeks.

I wish you hadn't left me for a job abroad almost as soon as we finally started our life together. 

I wish you would have listened to me and empathized instead of getting angry and yelling at me every time I tried to tell you I was sad and missed you. 

I wish you would have come back when you said you would. 

I wish you hadn't declared that we had nothing in common and no future and walked out on me a few months ago. I wish you hadn't started another relationship while I was still fighting to make ours work. 

I wish she hadn't been paying for your life--no, I wish you hadn't LET HER pay for your life.

I wish you hadn't lied and tried to gaslight me and make me seem crazy when I asked you about her.  

I wish you had let me into your life--

I wish you'd let me meet your friends, go to your events, be a part of the things that were important to you.  

I wish you would have been a part of my life, and been there for me on important days and during important times when I wanted and needed you there. 

I wish I hadn't so often been alone, or a third wheel, because my husband wasn't around. 

I wish you'd shown me vulnerability instead of anger and rage and defensiveness. 

I wish that so much could have been different. 

I wish it hadn't come to this.

In the beginning

Today is a sad day. Some days I just wake up and know its going to be a sad one. Sometimes it fluctuates from minute to minute or hour to hour between sadness and anger. But today is just overwhelmingly sad.

Today I sent the agreement to the divorce attorney, along with her retainer fee that cleared out the little bit of savings I had. Today I formally started the process to end my marriage..the marriage I thought would last for the rest of my life. The marriage I thought was so perfect and I felt so lucky to have found.

That's the hardest part. It wasn't always bad. In fact, it was consistently fantastic for awhile. It felt like a fairytale, which I guess should have been a red flag, but instead, I just enjoyed it and thought that "This must be what a GOOD relationship feels like!" There were always little things that turned into bigger things that turned into red flags, but I thought that every couple had problems, and those were just ours. I knew that no one was perfect, myself included, and I was dedicated to working through everything together. I loved him so much. Unfathomable amounts of love. I still love him. The truth is, I will always love him, despite everything. And even in the end, we still had some great times, and great days. 

In the beginning, we would talk for hours every single day. We had everything in common. He told me how beautiful I was, he listed off my positive characteristics like it was a grocery list. I thought that had finally found the person who really saw me for me, and who liked what he saw. I thought he saw my value, where all others had taken me for granted.  I felt so lucky and so blessed to have finally found a man who reciprocated my love and who thought I was as special as I thought he was.

Even in the bad times that followed, I kept coming back to that. I came back to the beautiful, romantic way we met--I was on vacation that I almost didn't take, at an event I wasn't even invited to and almost didn't go to, in a country where I didn't speak the language. I thought about the dreams I had before I met him--literal, actual dreams--which showed me not only his city, but our future. I even got his first name in a dream. I thought of how neither of us were supposed to be in the place where we were when we met. It was all fate, I thought. I truly believed that. I believed that he was my soulmate, and that I met him because I'd finally done enough work on myself to attract someone like him.

I was so wrong.

But I do believe that he also believed this. The problem is, that he believed it for self-serving purposes. And he's believed it for everyone he met before me, and for everyone who will come after me. Everyone is the next perfect love. Everyone is the one who will solve all of his problems. I wasn't special to him, I was just the one who served him best in the moment when he met me. He was still in love, whatever that meant for him, with his ex. Yet he had just broken up with a different girlfriend--a different woman than the one he was still in love with. I also found out just before he left that he had ANOTHER relationship going while he was with the girlfriend while he was still in love with his ex. That third woman was still in the picture months into our relationship (it's amazing what one can figure out by women who suddenly blocked me on facebook at the time, and by the ones who have done the same thing recently). They were dropping like flies for months after we first met, and he admitted that some of them were in love with him, but he didn't  feel the same way about them, because "he can't be everything to everyone." But I let it slide, because I had also had past loves, some of whom I was still in contact with. I also had to let a few guys down easy--ones that I was casually dating, because I knew as soon as I met him that I wanted to be with him and no one else. I thought we were in the same boat.

We weren't. 

I guess the silver lining in all of this is that he showed me how much I am capable of loving someone, and the extents to which I will go to for love. I had never felt more connected to another person, or to myself and my spirituality. I've never been a pray-er, but I was praying for him and for us every night. I counted the days until I could see him again. I wrote gushing love emails and sent cards and little gifts I would see that reminded me of him. I was a pretty amazing girlfriend in those early days.

Then I started to realize that he'd never bought me anything. He'd never once given me a gift, not even on Christmas or for our anniversary or my birthday. In fact, in the three years we were together, he was never with me on my birthday. There was always work or something more important, or, this year, he was with the other woman out at  a club...when I'd scheduled a vacation just for us. 

I went on vacation alone. 

I had a king bed and a hot tub in the honeymoon suite, alone. 

I went to dinner on my birthday, alone.

And what started as a sad day just turned back into an angry one...all I have to do is remember the way things went down in the last year, and how virtually nothing I ever gave, emotional or physical, was reciprocated. I have to remember the person he was in the last year or two instead of how good it was in the beginning.