Have you ever gone through an experience that changed you irrevocably?
Of course you have. A marriage breaks up. A friend dies suddenly. A house is sold. A child is born. A degree is earned. A new city becomes home. A stranger becomes the love of your life. If fiction is any sound indicator (and I do believe it is) our lives are a string of climaxes that we can’t reverse from. At some point, we all lay down to go to sleep one night knowing we will not wake up tomorrow the same as we did today, that we will never wake up again the same as we did today.
About a year ago, I was in the midst of dating someone I could only describe as halcyon. The affair was fresh and sweet and devoid of the struggle that I have found dating in a major city as a twenty something usually entails. They were kind. Kind in a genuine way that heals something in you. I hadn’t dated in a while so I was new again to courtship. But as angelic as it was, it wasn’t enough so to outshine the demons of my last break up. When I met this new person, I was only a short while out of an uncoupling that rocked me so vigorously no one could come for me. After being cheated on, my previous partner and I spent months unraveling the tangled ball of yarn that our relationship had become. It was an exhausting, profoundly fulfilling experience of exchanged vulnerability that left me with closure, but an unfamiliar compass that points to what I wanted and thought about love. I had to stumble my way out of the woods on my own before I could consider rebuilding anything with another person. I wanted to go on with this new person as if nothing had changed in me but couldn’t. I parted our ways and that will always make me a little bit sad.
I wish someone had told me the Pandora’s box that being cheated on opens. It’s not just the initial pain of betrayal or the insecurity of being so brutally abandoned. It’s like the fabric of whatever makes us able to connect to other people as humans gets shredded. Beyond the ability to trust or care for someone else after infidelity, being cheated on robs you of your understanding of these feelings at all, leaving you adrift in some foreign emotional sea. For the months that followed finding out, I felt like I was floating in my confusion, carrying the same low grade anxiety one does taking the subway in a new city. You’re just always trying to figure out both where you are and where you’re going at the same time.
After a third date with my kind new paramour that was as imaginably lovely as possible, I remember getting to the door of my apartment afterwards, opening it to my two drunk roommates entertaining a handful of drunker guests, and immediately bursting into tears in the kitchen. They reacted as all dutiful girlfriends do, dropping their jovial attention to their Friday night and consoling me without question of why they had to. They shooed away the drunk boys. They wrapped their arms around me. I sobbed. I screamed. I took a little sip of water then sobbed again. And finally when my sudden outpouring of grief had ebbed they asked me why it might have come on.
I have found honesty is never easier than the first thing we say when railing at god. Without pause or thought, I wailed that I was angry, so angry at my former partner not for the breach of trust but for becoming a ghost in my life. He was this miasma that hung over my love, my desires, my body… I was angry that I couldn’t go on a lovely third date and feel it’s loveliness. I could not swim in it for fear of sinking. I was angry that I was lost by no choice of my own.
I think about what my friend said to me next a lot. She told me that maybe what I couldn’t get past wasn’t that I had been hurt but that I would never love quite as innocently again after what he had done to me. In that moment my rage flowed out of me, knowing at last why I felt so lost. She was right. I was angry that despite forgiving him and understanding our past, I could never go back. My heart was changed. I could clean and dress the wounds, but the muscle would always work a little differently now.
But in the year that has followed that night, I have met accomplishments and experiences I used to live in torment over the impossibility of. Once I accepted there was no way backward, I moved forward. I fell in love with a career. I grew ever closer to my friends. I freed myself from a disorder that plagued me for most of my life. I was fulfilled by quiet nights at the hearth, safe and unalone. Yes, my heart worked differently now, but it felt buoyant with a newness like the first days of summer camp. My heartbreak became a bedrock for a new kind of love.
I don’t know if there is any feeling scarier than the one that follows tragedy or trauma. You get through the hardship itself and realize you still have to go on. You find yourself scared and alone in the unknown territory of your new perspective. I think the fear of that isolation is what keeps a lot of us from imparting the change we want to on our lives. Opening up to a new lover. Moving to a new city. Leaving a relationship. Going back to school. What if we get rocked again? What if we start over and then have to start all over again?
My life has rocked me again lately with my dad’s illness and familial upsets. Once more, I have to make a home in a new perspective or stay lost. This time I feel less untethered though and have been wondering why that is a lot. The knowledge that I am facing untraveled ground is not as debilitating. Now the realization comes with knowing that the map of my love has only spread larger when I’ve been here before. Perhaps a few more miles will get me exactly where I’m going. Somewhere solid and surprising all at the same time.
Life is ever expanding. The roads don’t get shorter. The rose doesn’t grow down. The house doesn’t get smaller. If it gets knocked down, we can build something bigger.
The Prompts
Are you happier, more contented now than you were 5 years ago? If yes, in what ways? If no, why?
Describe a blessing in disguise that has happened to you.
If you had to start all over again tomorrow, quit your job, sell your things, change your name, and start a new life, where would you go? Who would you be?
What is something, a behavior, a person, an idea, etc… you wish you could let go of?