Today is the end of a journey that started on August 8 last year - the JDA/Mervyns project. The time was exactly seven months after the end of my marriage, and I was still in the just-slightly-better-than-catatonic stage. The demands of the project were rigorous: travel every week for over a year, fly out early Monday morning, fly back late Thursday night. But I needed it. I needed something that was as absorbing and as demanding as this project to get me through the coming months.
Divorce, by the way, is the most fun you can have short of self-flaggelation. Inexpressible pain wrapped around loss, confusion, grief, fear, anger, hopelessness and ultimately, acceptance. I had everything I loved wrenched from me and had to start a brand new life, pretty much from scratch. The only constant was my job, and I think it went a long way towards helping me maintain my somewhat-tenuous hold on sanity during those days.
I've recovered a lot in the 14 months since the project started, and have actually reached the point where I am ready to move on. I have a new life - not the life I dreamed of, but a life for which I am grateful nonetheless. I survived the worst I could imagine and am now full of hope for the future.
Hope, by the way, is something I could not begin to conceive I might have 14 months ago. But time heals all wounds, and also - apparently - wounds all heels.
I don't know what comes next, but I do know that it is time to steer my own boat. The world looks so much different through these eyes. Not bad, just different.
I can hardly wait to see what comes next....
1 comment:
When you're going through the pain of a marriage ending, hope is inconceivable. The biggest struggle is not the question, "will I survive this," but rather the more important, "why would I want to survive?" Thanks for posting this; I wonder if I'll ever get in a place where I can say similar things.
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