Under all those crumbled fantasies

I'm just getting color back into my face.

When I moved out of Montana at the end of October, I had this plan, and I use “plan” loosely, but it was drafted with all the wrong premises anyway. I didn’t know what the premises were at the time, running in the background like programs someone else set into motion and kept coding while I was asleep. But I’ve since found them, less like viruses, more like spyware, not exactly destroying things, but tracking me and spitting out terribly inaccurate predictions.

Here are the ones I’ve located so far:

1. You will be sad, but not that sad when your youngest leaves for college. It will be a fun challenge to live alone for the first time ever.

2. You will figure out what you want to do with the rest of your adult life within 3 months. You will keep referring to this as a “transition period” and tell everyone that’s how long it will take.

3. Within that 3-month window, you will find an affordable place to live, figure out how to support yourself in a much more expensive area, and date, because you might as well keep an eye out for your twin flame, a.k.a. LOML, and concurrently navigate decades of relationship trauma that will surface once new people join the chat.

4. You’ll get your stuff out of those storage pods in no time.

Like I said. All the wrong premises. I can almost laugh at myself, but it’s a little too soon.

If you’ve already done the math, I’ve been in California nine months now. I have neither an affordable place to live, a career, nor a LOML to speak of, most of my things are still in storage pods, but I’ve sure done a lot of work I did not foresee doing. Case in point, I told this story a couple months ago. 

When Taylor Swift dropped The Tortured Poets Department album in April, I listened because she’s sad again, and like I said here, Sad Taylor is the one I like best. The songs turned over innocuously, pleasantly even, until this line: And I’m just getting color back into my face. That was the line where I cried. (Is it a thing? “Where were you in the album when you first cried?” and we all remember the moment, and maybe what we were wearing, like it was a marker on The Timeline of our lives?) The moment was during the song So Long, London, a song that tells a relationship story that sounds a lot like my marriage (“How much sad did you think I had in me?”).

Thank you, Taylor, it’s an excellent way to describe what I’ve been doing: I’m just getting color back into my face. After nine months, I’m just now feeling the life come back, and I wonder if it shows on my cheeks.

It takes time, this recovery -- not from divorce, or illness, or the pandemic, or the cross-country move, or sending my babies off to college – it’s not exactly that I’m recovering from those aches, nor the collective trauma of change and aging and facing my mortality. What’s taking time is recovering the self. What takes hours upon hours, weeks upon weeks, months upon months, is relocating my personhood, my heart, my divine wisdom, my playfulness, my joy, my creativity, my laughter, my confidence. All of those things got buried under the rubble of my crumbled fantasies of how my life should have turned out, and no one is coming to lift off each fallen stone but me. Every single one feels heavy.

If you ask me what I’ve been doing the last nine months, that’s what my new answer is: I’m lifting off the debris of all that nearly crushed me, using my own two hands with deliberateness, with prayer and weeping, and with a kindness to myself that I’ve never had before. I’m working at a holy pace, one in which I no longer neglect to feed myself, and one in which I take time to notice the space I occupy, so I can take up more.

Here are a few things that are helping me relocate myself in the cosmos, in California, and in the center of my belovedness:

1.      People. I have some gems among friends and family who faithfully call out my best self and give me gentle lectures when I lose sight of her.

2.      Nature. Soaking up sunshine, grounding with bare feet, and deeply inhaling pine and sea on rotation are most of the way there.

3.      Taking risks. Saying yes to things outside my comfort zone is surprisingly clarifying and empowering.

4.      Dating. Sure, dating helps me feel out what I want from partnership. But on this list, dating is an important practice for me to remember who I am, what I do well, and what I have to offer the world. My marriage chipped away at me in so many ways. IYKYK. The process helps me practice showing up as the person I want to be, it gives me a chance to put into practice the things I’ve learned from marriage and divorce, it gives me opportunity to practice secure attachment, and it encourages me to have fun. (Mind you, I can put energy into this process for about two weeks at a time, and then I need a break because it is so challenging.)

5.      Movement, and I don’t mean exercise. I just mean moving. It’s like reminding myself I’m soft and alive. A new thing about me is that I dance in the car. I take somatic workshops because trauma is stored in the body. I notice when I need to loosen up, open up, stretch, and take up physical space. (I see a theme.)  

Please note the only one of these that comes naturally for me is the first one. The rest are difficult, and half the work is maintaining persistent belief that these practices are helping me heal. To be not-at-all-clear, I am both having the time of my life, and also consistently disoriented and exhausted by the new territory. The last nine months have felt entirely uncharted, and often, my feeling-word for that is terrified. I’ve never ever lived alone. I’ve never spent a Mother’s Day without my kids. Because I married so young, I did almost zero dating in my 20’s. I’ve never paid $90 for a tank of gas. I’ve never wept while dancing to EDM at 9 AM because a somatic movement workshop made me. Now that I’m typing this out, it’s like a game of “Never Have I Ever,” Mid-40s Divorced Exvangelical Edition. Okay, late-40s, whatever.

But color is coming back into my face. I’m accepting that it’s going to take a long while to figure out what to do, where to live, how to survive, and who to share it all with. I’m not going to say something completely boring about the journey being the point, but I am going to say that I’m proud of myself. I feel brave. And scared. But each day, it seems more and more likely that my life could be full of joy, pleasure, love, and laughter. I lost that belief a long time ago, but it was just under the rubble, waiting for me to uncover it and wear it around my neck like a promise, like one of those gold necklaces with your name on it in cursive.

The name is Beloved.  

You are the Beloved too.

Leslie    

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