Right now, I feel like my identity has been stripped, changing the “us” to just “me”. This is how I’m surviving the first days after my divorce.
I’m currently in a time of identity reconstruction.
For the past 6 years, I’ve been a wife. Daniel’s wife, in particular. And for the year before that, I was his girlfriend and fiance. For almost 1/4 of my life, I wore a promise ring from him on my right hand and my wedding and engagement rings on my left hand. I planned my days’ activities around his classes and work and study schedules. I studied with him. We grocery shopped together. We road tripped together. I prided myself in serving him his favorite meals and avoiding tomatoes and sausage entirely. I DVRed “our” shows – The Big Bang Theory, Jeopardy, Friends.
And now, all of a sudden, there is no “we” or “our” or “his.”
The first time I went grocery shopping without him, I stood in the bread aisle completely frozen. I knew the brand of bread I used to buy. Oroweat Healthy Multi-Grain. It was the kind he liked most. But I wasn’t buying for him anymore and I was completely stuck in my tracks, as a million questions swirling through my mind. What kind of bread do I buy now? Should I still choose the Multi-Grain? Will it remind me of him every time I eat it? Do I even like that many grains? If not, what kind do I like?
And I didn’t have an answer.
My identity is shaken. Stripped, like worn wood, completely bare and undecorated.
I still have my foundation. I’m still a child of God. I’m still the youngest sister of 3. I’m still an aunt and a daughter and a friend and a lover of all things moose and averse to all things banana. I still love to cook and wish I could spend every second of every day with my dogs. I’m still a wannabe runner and could watch episodes of Gilmore Girls all day everyday.
But I’m not his wife anymore. That coat of paint that added color and flair to my wood foundation is gone and now I’m just…me. Plain and simple. And this process of stripping that paint away hurts. Pieces of him that were so engrained, so much a part of me, are now being painfully sanded away, taking bits of me with it. The future we had planned out together was erased before my eyes.
Some days, it’s like the grocery store all over again. I freeze in my tracks and just feel…lost. Stuck. Invisible. Heartbroken. Irrecoverably sad.
Other days, it feels freeing, being able to make my own decisions and pave my own path. There’s flexibility to create the life I want to live and hope for a future.
The thing about stripping wood is that it has a purpose. You don’t spend hours of your time, blood, sweat, and tears to divest wood of its paint only to destroy it by tossing it into a fire. The point is to completely remove the old to prepare it for the new. There is more life left to live.
In this process of stripping away this piece of my identity that has encompassed my world, I’ll be battered and ragged and quite plain for a while, but I’ll come out stronger and brighter in the end. This stripping is just creating a blank canvas for me to solidify who I am and who I want to become.
I’m still in the process of figuring out who exactly that is, but as the sun sets on this chapter of my life and I look forward to a future (that currently looks like a large, daunting question mark), I have hope.
And, for now, that’s enough.