I truly believe in forgiveness, I believe in the power of it. Not just ‘turn the other cheek’, not just that holding onto things is bad for your soul. I genuinely believe that the intellectual exercise of finding empathy and understanding for the situations and people that have hurt us can be transformative, and can help us turn the ugliness of anger and pain into something beautiful.
The ugly truth is though, that I’m not there yet. I’m not even close. For me, for him, for mistakes made, words said and unsaid, for choices made over a lifetime that led us to this point and for choices made now that compound this ugliness.
Breakups are undignified at the best of times. Something as personal as the entire structure of your life shattering into pieces would hopefully be private, but it’s not, it is unceremoniously public. It is interesting, it is gossip, it is a rollercoaster of emotions and endless choices you thought you’d never have to make. It is disappointing your grandmother, it is explaining to your children why you can’t be everything they’ve always known a family to be. It is friends choosing sides when you haven’t asked and friends not choosing you when the most vulnerable parts of you wish they would. It is a million tiny paper cuts of loss. It is crying in the car and on the floor and at the bar and over brunch. It is undignified anger and pain, it is regret for the past and regret for the present and lingering regret for the future. It is….messy, chaotic and ugly.
I could write a narrative of one-sided victimhood (god knows it’s how I feel sometimes), I could write a narrative of personal triumph, of dignity, of ‘thriving’. Fuck it’s my blog, I could write utter fiction and I could write myself a character that is above and beyond it all. I could write beauty where there is ugliness and maybe, maybe you’d even believe me for a minute.
But for some reason I find that even uglier. I find that even more undignified. I may be on the floor but what I am learning each painstaking day is to have a little grace for myself while I’m down here.
I talk a lot about grace at the moment, hoping the people around me will hold some for me, being surprised by those who do and those who don’t. Working to learn grace for myself, feeling its power when I succeed, feeling lost when I do not.
It is my friends that first showed me the power of grace in this moment. Some still do. It is my psychologist who encouraged me to learn to hold it for myself. How to have empathy for the ugliness in me and around me, how to truly believe that it’s ok not to be ok. It is in small moments of grace that I can write this without shame, laugh at hard truths with friends, find the strength to say no to things that no longer serve me and be brave enough to chase the things that do.
Grace is the empathy of friends who hold space for ugly moments, Grace is my parents driving 7 hours to distract my children so I can fall apart. Grace is the man who holds me crushingly tight and wipes away tears he didn’t cause when I can’t keep going.
Grace holds me calmly as I sit cross legged on the floor looking at the shattered pieces of my life slowly figuring out how to reshape them into something beautiful.
The middle of the bed 