There’s nothing more unoriginal than declaring you’ve been through a divorce and are trying to make sense of it. It’s a so commonly shared experience it almost always generates the same head nodding reaction: Yes, yes, I know someone too. Ah, I’m so sorry.

On the grief scale, it’s right up there with death. Nothing like the destruction of a defining relationship to turn your life upside down. My experience was no different. Brutal.

Six years ago, fresh from the trauma of it, I chose to write my way through it and share that with everyone.

First, trying to find some comfort and beauty in it.

A year later, I tried to explain why the fallout was still colouring everything around me.

Both essays offered a pretty and managed way to make sense of things but once everyone moved on from reading my thoughts about it I was left alone with the weight of it. The reality of it. I ran out of stuff to say.

I was only left with time in front of me to actually deal with the facts of the thing. I was in love. I was loved and then it was over.

Flash forward years. This week my ex and I are finalizing the last financial pieces of our uncoupling and I’m moved to write again. But the words you’re reading now aren’t really designed to help me process anymore. I’m writing now to anyone who might be where I was years ago in the hopes it helps ease the misery.

You might be asking why it took so long to get here. Do some people get divorced and it’s super simple, clean and quick? Sure they do. However, when you get divorced in an expensive market like Toronto, and you’ve been together a really long time, it’s hard to be swift about these things without significant collateral damage.

We have a wonderful kid together and we wanted to create stability for her so it took me awhile to buy my ex out of the joint property we owned. We chose the long, challenging arrangement but the right thing for our kid. (By the way, this is such a common situation that my talented broker made a whole business of helping divorcing couples sort out mortgage stuff. So, if you need a reference, drop me a note.)

We worked at a sane divorce. A good divorce. I will say that helped a lot. It’s an impossibly difficult choice in the beginning when feelings are raw. It was a choice that my closest friends and family hated for me since it involved a lot of compromise and swallowed feelings for the sake of peace. If you’re going through a divorce now or thinking of doing it, consider me a voice from the future. If you can do it this way — resolve to break apart your world in the gentlest way possible — it’s worth the effort. You might just get to the other side mostly intact. It breaks my heart to hear about the way divorce ruins people financially because it’s hard to see past the emotional pain of it. I get completely how it can happen but still…brutal.

With time, eventually all the co-parenting stuff and the business of life become routine. That’s the weird part honestly and inescapable if you have kids together. In a way, you have to get here or your life might be miserable. You just keep putting down the pain of the loss of the relationship and the damage it’s done to your heart and soul until it becomes familiar to do so. At first you do it for your kid, but eventually you’re doing it for your well-being, and finally you’re doing it for your ex (and eventually for his or her new person if that happens — and it did in my case). I think this is probably what people mean when they say time can heal things. However, I think heal is probably the wrong word. Time teaches you how to live in a new reality.

To get here is a privilege. The ability and resources to get here are a privilege too. So, make no mistake about it, I’m lucky and grateful.

Looking back on things, I feel so much heartbreak for people who find themselves in a situation where this kind of outcome is impossible. But to choose a combative path when you do have the resources to sort out a “good divorce” — where kids get dragged and the trauma of it becomes nuclear? Well, that I’ll never understand.

So, anyway. The business of it becomes normal. New boundaries are set and with every passing day the distance between you and this person and the time you spent together gets larger until you’re really left alone with the reality of being alone. Faced with the emotional impact of the whole thing. This takes a surprisingly long time and even longer if you delay the work from exhaustion or fear or whatever else stops you from looking deep inside yourself.

Some people stop moving forward in that moment, turn to the next most likely partner, and try the whole thing again without ever exploring the feelings part. And, really, who can blame them because exploring deeper by yourself really sucks. You could make a strong argument for growth through new relational experiences, I suppose. But, I’m not here to judge people’s choices. A key takeaway of this piece (in case you’re missing the point) is that being a human is difficult.

I always felt like if I didn’t figure out what the fuck really happened I might hurt someone else unintentionally. (My side of the thing, of course, and not his because if you try to sort the mind and behaviour of another human at any given moment you might be searching for answers forever. You never really know with people, you know? Accepting that has been a huge comfort.)

So, I’ve been mostly single ever since. This isn’t a clean process. Full of starts and stops and rumination. I’d love to say I just woke up one morning and was like — WOW — I love this. Being single is the best! That would be a lie.

It’s more like a constant, years long haze made up of the below feelings, experienced with various degrees of sadness and fear:

OMG. I’ve been rejected by the only romantic partner I loved & trusted. This will kill me.

I did something wrong. It’s me. Picked the wrong person. I wouldn’t be here if had I been smarter.

I’m probably essentially unlovable and shouldn’t have tried in the first place.

Maybe if I hate love and tell everyone that I’ll protect myself from future pain.

I’m so embarrassed this happened at all. I’m never leaving my house again.

This failure will define me forever and I can’t ever have it happen again.

Heavy, right? Feels good to be honest tho. This is much easier to consider once you’ve escaped the instability of the initial impact and have had some time to sit with the chaos and process it. Years. I’m sharing it here because if you’re having big feelings about the above crap and it’s taking forever to sort it out then you’re not alone. You’re actually in amazing company.

Remember where I started? More than half the people around you are experiencing some massive relationship failure and are trying to make sense of it. It took me too long to understand that and it was so lonely until I got it. Hope you accept that sooner than I did. All those people are probably scared to talk about it too. Heartbreaking to think how many people are walking around in life under a layer of shame for all of it. Humans can really be jerks to themselves. It’s a unfortunate thing.

A simple way to make sense about why divorce is so painful and difficult is to think about why we bother trying in the first place. Life is about creating meaning through love and our relationships. We keep taking risks in love because that’s how we learn about ourselves. Getting hurt is just a system feature. You can try to avoid this but to do so you’d have to ignore the fact that you’re human. I’ve tried that. Wouldn’t recommend it.

So, what did I learn?

Let’s talk about the failure part first. Well, where I landed anyway. I think we’ve created so much pain and fear and suffering around relationships because of the largely patriarchal idea of the relationship escalator to marriage and the expectation to sustain it. That if you can’t get that done, and make it work decades, you’re not doing life properly. (Or, in my case, common law co-habitation but let’s be honest it’s basically the same thing without the religion part.)

This idea is bullshit.

This frame is especially unkind to women like me at middle age with children. Society often sees women who find themselves alone as a failure of the individual. (And, conversly, men who are alone as a societal failure instead.) People feel bad for and worry for us. (If you add cats by the way — and I have two — the stereotype gets even more depressing!)

This idea is so deeply ingrained in us that when divorce happens it becomes reflexive to make the trauma a central part of your identity. To tell everyone when they ask: I am a 47 year old *divorced* mother.

But that’s deeply wrong. Divorce happened in my life. I experienced it but it isn’t who I am. If you’re the kind of person who defaults to trying to define humans generally with this kind of shorthand, please stop. It’s unkind and it doesn’t leave people much grace to evolve and accept themselves as they are.

I’m the kind of person who keeps reading and researching until I find my way out of the boxes we think we’re stuck in. Thankfully, there is an endless stream of insight from smart people who have been thinking about our relationship boxes who we can learn from. I think we owe a lot of thanks to those folks who are pursuing new kinds of relationship structures and arrangements whether they be LGBTQ or not.

Freedom from the box of what a romantic relationship should look like, or the length it should be, is within reach if you want it. It’s a very freeing exercise to consider the options. I still don’t have a clear picture of what future relationships might look like for me but the relief that comes from abandoning the guilt of failure — getting off the relationship escalator and smashing the stereotype too — is everything. I’m just me, okay? I’m doing my best. That’s enough.

It’s also become very obvious to me that the idea of having your needs entirely met by one special person is an elusive one. Some people find joy and comfort in traditional commitment with one person. I’m so happy for these people. (This includes my parents who have been married 50 + years and still love each other dearly!) But, a lot of people won’t.

Personally, I have found a lot of joy connecting on a deep level with different people without the pressure of defining things. You know that saying, people are seasons? Letting the humans in your life flow in and out of frame without expectation is a beautiful thing. It’s about the joy of enjoying people in the moment knowing that at some point it will end. If it’s not the ever-changing flow of life that will shift your relationships, then eventually, unavoidably, death. I wish I had landed here sooner honestly. It feels good.

Now, for the rest of it. Most of us have the ability to hold space for other humans with compassion and grace. So, if a friend read you that above list of emotional shrapnel you would immediately tell them they’re wrong. That they should be far more gentle with these feelings. So, why is it so damn hard to do that for ourselves?

All roads at this point lead back to that annoying advice that you need to love yourself. That you need to create an internal compass and validation feedback loop so strong that other people can decide not to choose you and you can recover from the injury.

An emotional workout routine to build the muscle mass able to take the punch of rejection. The ability to feel all your hard feelings all the way through. Feel them move through your body without judgement and then feel them leave. To keep digging to find the feeling under the feeling under the feeling until you really see yourself.

With time and consideration, the picture of my divorce started to look more like this: I fell in love with a person who was right for me until he wasn’t. It was a good choice to try to love someone regardless of the outcome. The experience changed me. The rejection changed me. Taking the time to process all of it honestly made me stronger. All of this, however painful and difficult, ultimately led me to understand who I actually am.

I think I love differently from here now. I’m not sure there’s any other choice. I definitely love myself better now.

I’m a writer so my impulse is to try to explain all of it to you in the most simple of ways. The truth is it’s not simple at all. The messiness of divorce escapes a perfect explanation but at least things are more clear to me than they ever have been before. I’m so grateful to be in a place where I can honestly tell you I don’t regret any of it.

This week is a huge milestone in this process. We were together 11 years. It took me basically half that time to get here and that feels right. I bought this beautiful and I’m told “unkillable” plant to mark the occasion. Felt right to buy something alive to make note of the progress. I like the part about my not being able to kill the thing even if I tried.

My daughter and I were recently talking about the divorce and I asked her if she remembered any of it. She was really little then, older now. She told me she really doesn’t remember much and that it was okay. He married someone new, someone lovely, that my daughter loves and that I respect. My daughter asked me: All of it was actually good, right? I said to her with a full heart that, yes, in fact, it was the thing that needed to happen. Her Dad and I were just not the right match in the end. She nodded in agreement. Now that she’s older, it makes perfect sense to her.

After all this time, it makes perfect sense to me too.