I am writing this as an ode to one of my life’s greatest lessons;
To believe in the power of dreams.
My life is based on the memory that magic was and is real, we remember very little about the true nature of our souls. This experience, the first amongst many, made me remember the power I had within myself to conceive, and create anything I desired. I don’t want much, but what I have, I am so grateful for.
I am a high achiever and have accomplished so much at a young age. I graduated high school at seventeen and went straight to college. I had been working at fifteen and saved enough money to take myself to Europe as a parting gift to my adolescence. I traveled around Europe at 17, waited to have a boyfriend at 18 (this was unheard of), graduated from University at 21, lived in San Francisco on my own and eventually with amazing roommates, moved to Hawaii, and did the hustle in New York by 24. I worked for a popular magazine publication and still felt there was so much more.
I flirted with teaching meditation and helped people access their spirituality. I gave people casual lessons in meditation, but I felt like I wanted to strive for something more worldly. I moved from New York back to California and started an MFA program at 25. I was determined to start creating the life I so deeply desired. I wanted to build my life with someone and be a modern woman.
At 26, I married the man I thought I’d be with forever, although the romance was serendipitous and charming, there was a lot of pressure from my traditional family to get married. Divorce was not in my peripheral. I came from a family of divorce and when I decided to marry, I wanted to “do it right”. I was sure that he and I could pioneer ourselves through our past broken family experiences and that we would succeed at breaking the narrative of divorce. We simply couldn’t.
At the turn of 28, I was a divorced woman.
As I saw it, this short and unfulfilled time came with a huge mark of failure. I had failed the one thing I said I could do, but couldn’t. On the Eve of the New Year, there was a lot of crying. I sat on my floor sobbing. What had I done? Had I made a mistake? Why was love so hard, and why did I want to be married so badly in the first place?
The next year went on to teach me all of those things. I had tried to invest myself into a partnership that could have never succeeded because we lacked fundamental connection and a great deal of communication to learn. It made me look at the inner dysfunction that I stored away. I was ready to give my whole life to someone else to fix them instead of working on healing myself. I loved the potential of him, and I was hoping the “fix”him to become whole.
Love was hard for me. It rooted in finding love with anxious/ avoidant tendencies. I believed it was not real love if it wasn’t painful. I was taught that love should be chased and fought for, even if toxic. My parents were young and stayed married for over ten years, but they lacked the effective skills to communicate with one another, and now, they are slowly learning. After years of not listening to one another, they saw past their differences and grew from one another. Their biggest mistake was that they didn’t have much grace for one another, which at the end of my relationship, I made sure I upheld grace. No hard feelings, no “I hate you”, and no blaming him for the way things ended. I remembered that I had married him originally because I loved him. I loved him so much, I hoped to spend my life with him, but in the end, I felt like if I loved him, why would I ask him to stay and try to be in something we weren’t ready for?
My perceived failure came from an internal pressure to create a healthy marriage with the same toxic mentality that created divorce. Of course, I didn’t understand this at the time, I just felt like crap.
I felt like I wanted something impossible. I would not have the life I envisioned for myself. My challenge was to untangle myself from the fantasy.
I had therapy during the divorce because I needed a safe space to discuss my anxieties and immense fears without triggering anyone else around me. The idea that I’d lose both my Master's degree and my marriage was nonexistent. My therapist said it best, “Right now, you have to choose which one is more important to you, and you’ve been doing your best at both, you’ll have to put on pause; your marriage, or your Master’s.”
Most people, if they are in a healthy relationship, would never have to choose.
I learned that when there is a swell of resistance in life, and nothing you do seems to change anything, your focus needs to shift towards what is working. Only then can life begin to flow again, the stickiness unravels and the currents of your life’s best choices and decisions become clear.
I put my unhealthy marriage on pause and I never looked back. I understood that without it, I was still unhealthy. I was the other piece of the unhappiness,.
There it was, the failure swallowed, the idea of wanting marriage accepted, and the vision of a future unknown. I was sad beyond belief. I lacked the basis for happiness. I lacked contentment, I lacked fulfillment. I was a shell of a person. I knew there’d be more for me, my story didn’t end after this period, but it felt like my heart had broken so deeply. I grieved all the failed relationships I had ever had up until now, and ultimately, I grieved the castle I built out of sand.
This brought me to the core of an insight that changed the way I lived from that point on. I looked at myself and gave myself grace too. I saw that a potential had not been met. But I had the vision. If I was not capable of having How could I see marriage and a family if I was not capable of it? I understood then that I needed to hold the potential open to the universe to fill that up for me. I had to learn who I was in that filled potential. Who was I, the woman who saw everyone else’s potential, yet not her own? I didn’t know who she was or what she lived for. I had to learn to cultivate fulfillment, the aspect I felt I deeply lacked, to feel like I could have anything again.
Then the dreams started coming…
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