The Things That Fell Off: An Introduction
There’s a super strange assumption people sometimes make about divorce.
That what follows is mostly devastating loss.
Loss of stability.
Loss of certainty.
Loss of place.
Loss of identity.
Loss of the life you thought you were building.
Loss of the idea of who you wanted to be.
And in a lot of ways, that’s true. Divorce completely rearranges everything. Dumps in upside down. Dashes it all to the ground. It crumbles the story you thought you were living. It reroutes the future you’d dreamed of and maybe had begun to build..
But in the years since mine, I’ve come to realize something that newly-divorced me would have found really hard to believe.
Not everything that disappeared from my life was something I truly lost.
Some things simply… fell off.
Habits I had developed over an entire lifetime without really noticing.
Roles I had meekly and subserviently stepped into.
Beliefs I carried because they had at one time seemed not just holy… but also necessary in order to keep my life stable and my relationships intact.
For a long time, those instincts felt like emotional and spiritual maturity, to be honest. They felt like kindness, empathy and long-suffering. They felt like the holiest way to love. They felt like the most responsible way to move through the world as a Christian wife and mom and church leader.
But over time, I began to see them in completely different light.
They were, in all honesty, survival strategies.
Ways of navigating and coping with complicated relationships. Ways of keeping the emotional temperature of my life at a manageable level. Ways of protecting and insulating the people around me - sometimes at the expense of myself.
But when my marriage ended, some of those habits slowly started to fall away.
Not all at once. Definitely not.
And not in some grand, dramatic, burning-bush-in-the-desert kind of way. No miraculous visitations for these lessons.
Nah. More like the gradual shedding of things that once served some purpose (or so I thought) but were no longer necessary for the life I was building. Even though I had no idea at the time that I was building anything. Because what can you actually build from rubble.
This next series of essays is about those things.
The need to over-explain myself.
The belief that careful words could keep me safe.
The role of peacekeeper.
The instinct to shrink.
The need to be liked.
The assumption that everyone was operating in good faith.
The habit of fixing other people’s discomfort.
The fear of being “too much.”
And finally, the wild illusion that if I just handled things carefully enough, I could control how my life unfolded. Heh.
Each of these upcoming essays reflects on something I once carried that slowly fell away in the years after my divorce.
Not because I forced it to.
But because life has a way of revealing which rituals are rooted in wisdom - and which are bad habits simply built for survival out of desperation.
What remains after those things fell away?
Not perfection.
Not certainty.
Just a life that feels a lot more honest.
