I Got Divorced. Here’s What Nobody Tells You About What Comes After.

I got divorced a little over a year ago.

I’ve written around this for a few weeks now – the quiet, the last-times I didn’t recognize as last-times, the slow leak of admitting something to myself before I could say it to anyone else. I think I needed to write around it before I could write about it directly. So: that’s what this was building toward. My marriage ended, and for a long time I didn’t know how to talk about it without either performing devastation I didn’t fully feel, or performing a strength I didn’t have yet either.

Here’s what nobody told me, and what I wish someone had.

Nobody tells you that the hardest part isn’t the ending, it’s the identity underneath it. I wasn’t just losing a marriage. I was losing the story I’d been telling myself about who I was inside it – the version of me that had a role, a shorthand, an answer ready when someone asked how long. Figuring out who I was without that sentence to lean on took longer than the divorce itself.

Nobody tells you that you’re allowed to feel more than one thing about it at the same time. I was relieved and grieving in the same week, sometimes the same hour, and for a while I thought that made me a fraud – like real grief wasn’t supposed to have relief sitting next to it. It turns out most people’s does. Nobody just talks about it.

And nobody tells you – this is the part I actually want to leave you with – that it’s possible to come out the other side without losing your faith in love. I know how that sounds, coming from someone a year out. But I mean it plainly: I didn’t stop believing in love. I stopped looking for it as something someone else was supposed to hand me. The work I did in that year – the unglamorous, repetitive, occasionally embarrassing work of sitting with myself instead of running from the quiet – is where I actually found it. Not a version I was waiting on. A version I built, on my own, before I was looking for anyone else to share it with.

I don’t think my marriage ending was a punishment or a mistake I need to keep paying for. I’ve come to believe it redirected me toward something I wouldn’t have found any other way, even though I would never have chosen the path there on purpose.

That’s the last piece of backstory I’ve been circling. From here, I want to write more about what I actually did with that year – the specific, sometimes small, sometimes strange things that helped. If you’ve been following along, thank you for staying with the slow version of this story. The rest of it is what the newsletter is for.

With Love, Wren

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