"I'M CAUGHT UP IN THE CURRENT, KNOWING THAT I'M CERTAIN TO BE SAVED." - LENNON STELLA

When I started this blog, I named it "the five stages of fuck you," because I wanted to tie in the five stages of grief with the desire to not give a fuck about what people thought of me anymore. I wanted to encourage people to live for themselves and no one else. I wasn't going to get over my grief quickly in order to make anyone happier or more comfortable. For the first time, I was truly allowing myself to work through things that I had never worked through. Two divorces. Poor relationship with my mother and family. Nearly dying, twice. Military service. An eviction. A repossession. Feeling undeserving and unworthy. Feeling misunderstood and unloved.

They say that it's during your hardest moments that you realize who your true friends are. But instead of people leaving me this time, I made the decision first, to leave them. I worked so hard on becoming aware of what was really happening around me. Where I use to just brush off their snide comments in order to not lose a friendship, I started to put those comments in a hypothetical jar, counting the many times that person had hurt my feelings, and giving it a deadline for when it was time to move on from that relationship. In the end, what this has really done is left me very, very lonely.

Loneliness is something I really struggle with. But something I am actively working on all the time. I want to feel happy when I'm alone. Happy in my own skin. With my own company. And over the past year, I have felt more and more at peace and better acquainted with myself than ever. But, I am no where near healed. I have moments where I feel great. I'm working out again, eating so much better. I'm working hard at my job and working toward my goals. On the outside, I look like I'm doing fantastic! But, the truth is, somehow I am currently going through the hardest part of my healing process.

A couple of things have transpired over the past couple of weeks. One of them is that I think that I am JUST NOW grieving over my marriage. I find myself wondering if we gave up too soon or if I made the mistake of leaving him. I've even wondered if one day we would get back together. Then, I went out to lunch with him to figure out some tax stuff from last year. I asked him, "do you ever think maybe we gave up too soon?" Without any hesitation, he said, "no." And everything I already knew about why I left in the first place became clear to me again. 7 years with someone and to feel nothing? To have no regrets? And let the grieving begin!

In that moment, it was like I was just now leaving him. Like it was happening all over again. Then I realized, I haven't really cried over him. I remember one time I called him crying, about a week after I left. He got annoyed that I was upset. As if I was just supposed to be fine with leaving my husband, whom I NEVER thought I'd divorce, after 7 years of being together, and never shed a tear? I was so angry that it was so easy for him. And the other day was just another glimpse. How much time, effort, and love I put into that relationship to LITERALLY, ACTUALLY GET NOTHING. I think after that phone call I was just too mad to even care.

See, I've been going through the five stages of grief this year. I would call denial the part where I was having sex with a new guy every week. Anger when I started smoking cigarettes and drinking so much wine that I actually got so drunk and sick one night that I threw up for an hour while completely alone in my own apartment. Bargaining when I signed up to move across the world on a moments notice, I think in hopes my problems would stay behind or when I got into a relationship with someone COMPLETELY wrong for me and hoping, for fucks sake, that it was right and good. And then we come to sadness. And after sadness, acceptance. But, I think that we confuse the feeling after bargaining and before sadness for acceptance. And I think, sometimes, we confuse anger with sadness. Because they have very similar presentations. So after being angry, we think maybe we are done. We can move on.

I wrote a blog late last year about how I don't feel like I've ever been in this place before. How I have never been to the point where I allow myself to really heal from things. I have mistaken bargaining for acceptance and anger for sadness so many times in my life that I always just assume it's time to move on. The "fake happiness" moves in and I feel this euphoria for some amount of time until it all comes crashing back down. And here's what I've learned -- it will ALWAYS come crashing back down. The other shoe will ALWAYS drop. So yeah, I've never been here before. I've never been truly sad. I've never truly grieved, ever!

We are conditioned to "get over it" and "move on" and we are treated as mentally ill or crazy if it takes us a long time to heal and be really ready to move forward with our lives. Not but 6 months after I left my husband my mother accuse me of being bipolar, manic, crazy, and unstable. 6 months. It makes me look at people differently. It helps me empathize with others. When I see someone acting out of character or "strange" in any way, I now wonder "what are they going through?" rather than, "what's wrong with them?" Because I know what it feels like to be going through something so intense, so heartbreaking, so confusing and how that can cause us to not be ourselves for a while. How we cope any way we can, whenever we can.

The smartest move I made this year was not moving to Spain last August. I didn't know it at the time, but something felt wrong about leaving. What that did was that it gave me room for growth. I am constantly trying to "get over it" and find that "fake happiness" that will melt away all my sorrows. And that's what Spain was at first. It was an escape. Something to consume my thoughts and take my mind off of everything. As soon as I deferred Spain, things got harder and harder and harder. And for good reason. I quit trying to fill my time with things that couldn't matter until I was healed. Travel has a way of changing you, but it's almost like falling in love. You can't love someone until you love yourself. And travel can't really change you if you don't even know who you are.

I am struggling right now. And I've never struggled like this before. And I think it's because I've never made it to the step called sadness. I can honestly say that I can see why people don't allow themselves to make it to this step. It's the hardest one, by far! And it presents as depression. Lack of interest in things. Lack of self-care. Lack of interest in your physical appearance. Sleeping a lot. Eating less. Listening to sad music. Avoiding people and places. Crying. But even with all that, I feel better than I've ever felt. It's like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Truth is, I think that if I wasn't hurting right now, I would be concerned. This is not a dying pain. This is a healing pain. With each step, I continue to grow and I am surprised more each day by the hurdles I conquer. I don't plan to stop my progression, although, sometimes I would do anything to make the pain go away. I can visualize my healing and I understand how necessary it is now. I no longer desire to "move on." However long it takes, it takes. Just like you can't rush a wound in it's healing, nor can you rush a broken heart in it's mending.

"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."

-Sigmund Freud