It sucks when you start crying on the metro train to work before 9am. It’s a weird feeling like drinking before noon, or something – it’s just not something you are supposed to do, right?
As the tears flow down my cheeks faster than I can wipe them, I am furiously muttering under my breath, “It is too fucken early to be crying! God damn it! Way too fucken early.”
In the last few weeks, I had experienced a whole new pain. A pain that had transcendent everything I have ever done in my life to this moment. The moment when all the labels that I had placed on myself my entire life, and all the hard work I put into being them, had all crashed – mother, wife and lover had no meaning.
It also turns out that I was not that beautiful, smart, creative woman, nor a fabulously sexy and spontaneous wife, or anything remotely in between any of what I thought I was. This may not be the reality people tell me, but that is how I feel right now…
There was nothing left.
I had failed at the most important task in life, I thought.
My insides had been transformed to absolutely nothing. Just pain. This is the end, I thought. This is really the end.
And the tears just keep flowing, like a blood stream from a cut vein, and I can’t stop them. I feel ashamed as the train fills with people and I can feel their glares and stares piercing thru my soul.
My thoughts are stuck again. I am trying to make sense of everything – it was one thing to come to the decision to separate, but now it was a whole new pain. And it doesn’t matter if it was a temporary lapse of reason, or if it was all real. The final blow killed my heart and any hope for reconciliation at all. This was a deal breaker.
The 45-minute train ride feels like 5 minutes as my thoughts are warped in a whirlwind of crap that scurry around without any rhyme or reason. There are too many of them to combat. Just too many.
My head fills with images of my entire life, floating around uncontrollably – those moments in time – right now – I would love to erase all. Every. Single. One.
ALL OF THEM.
I walk out of the train station and I feel surreal. I want to scream! I want to tell everyone how much pain I am in. I want everyone to know!
Suddenly the anger sets in, and a multitude of thoughts sprinkled with the F-bombs, floods my mind. It’s crazy in there but I can feel my whole body strangely energized. It feels good. Powerful. Assertive.
I step into the elevator in the office building and take several deep breaths.
“Got to keep going, damn it. I just gotta keep going.”
This has been my battle lately. Almost every day for several weeks now I have started my day this way. It is very much like my early days of sobriety, except I have hope which is totally HUGE!
I was first reaching out to everyone and anyone I knew, but then all that was also adding into the chaos in my head. So I went silent instead, and found some peace in not going on social media, not calling friends, not watching TV, not reading, not listening to the radio, but only remembering:
In all times of emotional disturbance or indecision, we can pause, ask for quiet, and in the stillness simply say: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Thy will, not mine, be done.” – AA 12&12, Step Three, page 41.
In that stillness I found my broken pieces coming back together. I actually saw the light peeking thru my clouds. I actually felt more leveled and positive and I was able to see the good that this is starting to bring. That is also HUGE!
I am finding many different little ways to hang on, like focusing on to those little sayings and quotes that I see. They become my mantras for the hours, or the days, that help me to understand, that let me feel, that give me permission to be broken, and as broken as I want to be.
I absolutely love these two…
Glennon Doyle Melton says, “Grief is holy, like joy! Don’t snatch it from people with hurried hope, please. Pain is often all a woman has left to prove she loved.”
Laura McKowen says, “If you want a breakthrough you must first surrender to the breaking.”
I hope you are finding a way to hang on too!
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