I once kept another blog, a couple years ago when I was trying to pluck up the courage to leave my marriage. It took a long time, a VERY LONG time to leave, but I got there in the end. It is now eight months since I have been single again and all the manic diaries I used to keep still sit mutely in the anonymous Gmail account I set up to hide stuff away.I’ve written very little over the past eight months, mostly because I’ve been so darned busy getting on with life, I barely have the time. The parenting of children, the dog I adopted, the running I took up… all neatly slotted into the spaces that used to be filled with solitary sobbing and bashing out painful words on the laptop. I typed so much I wore away the keys. About a year later, the wear was most visible on the letters “S”, “A” and “D” (along with "E", "O" and "L"... go figure).
The trouble with filling up the spaces is that there is no time for pause or reflection and life passes far too quickly which, the older you get, is not a good thing. In the marriage I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I told a therapist I was “waiting to exhale”. Well now I am exhaling and need to allow the space to see how that feels. Creating a new blog is one way of doing that.
Even after all the couples counselling had been done, I wept and tortured myself and pummelled myself into the ground over the decision to leave. The therapist suggested that I draw up two lists of bullet points: one was a description of what my life might look like ten years from now if I stayed, the other was a description of what my life would look like if I left. I spent days agonising over how to be fair to each 'life' and, at the end of the exercise, both imagined lives contained good and bad points. But there was no denying which one I wanted. Even though it was like leaping into the complete unknown and terrifying beyond belief, the mere possibility of not having to live with the deepest discomfort and unhappiness at the core of my being was far more important than deciding the price was too great, staying, putting on a happy face and making the best of it.
"The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."
~ M. Scott Peck
