Walking Through Fire

All this time I thought walking through the fire meant doing a really hard thing. Same as lifting heavy weights, same as running a marathon. Only painful. But that's not what walking through the fire is.

It's so annoying how obvious a lesson is or what a phrase means, but how you don't really get it until something happens in your life and it comes to you and you think - ooohhhhhh, that's what that means. 

Fire is not something you would walk through. There is no guarantee that walking through fire would be a good thing. A person who saw fire would know that it means certain death and would immediately look for any other possible way out of the situation. To walk through fire is to abandon every part of your instincts and do a thing that doesn't feel right, makes no sense, and will most definitely be painful. Why would anyone ever choose to walk through fire? 

This is where I am. My marriage is ending. And sadly, I have to be the one to formally pull the plug. Although my husband is the one who left me emotionally and made it clear that he no longer felt the way he once did for me, he didn't actually go anywhere. We tried couples counseling, and one session we quit, the next we got fired, and after a very sad but illuminating session with ChatGPT – it became clear to me what was going on. 

I didn't want to let go. I did so much work on myself. I learned all the ways I screwed up the relationship. I came to a point where I truly felt I knew how to love myself and not rely on the love from him to be okay. And it was all very good. It was powerful healing that I could not have done if I hadn't been pushed in this way. I was learning to love myself despite the big wall he built between us. I was emotionally exhausting to him, and no matter how small I made myself, it was never small enough. But I did become acutely aware of many things about myself, which were very uncomfortable truths. 

The human capacity for self-deception is, how should I say it – annoying. I could not state it loudly or strongly enough, so I will understate it immensely. I am a lot. And in many ways, I put my emotional world on display to as many people who will take a look simply because I have not sat long enough with who I am to truly accept it. 

I didn't sit long enough with all the pain that comes from a father or two who abandoned me, or an emotionally absent mother. I didn't sit with how those things affected me and left me with wounds that would take some real work to overcome. Whether my father actually abandoned me is subjective. He was not in the picture. Whether my mom was emotionally absent is also subjective. I was left with a feeling of too muchness and being very alone with big and scary thoughts and feelings. Growing up in a religious background with the kinds of profound questions I seem to have been born with left me feeling a lot of shame. 

So I did the worst thing I could do. I found someone who had a very hard time understanding how to love me, and I made his love mean that I was or was not worthy of love. I found someone that reinforced all the pain I had ever felt. He could not understand who or how I was. He could not love me in a way that felt good to me. And ultimately, my way of being in the world – questioning, seeking, learning, but all without being really healed – felt like the weight of a thousand pounds of cotton. Slowly, but consistently, being piled at his feet. 

Although I knew I was wholeheartedly responsible for so much that went wrong, I also knew that I wasn't responsible for all of it. I wish I were. Because then maybe I could fix it. But after months of trying to fit myself into a way of being that would give him enough space to decide to come back to me, I realized, he would have to undergo his own kind of growth for that to ever occur. And you just can't make someone grow. No matter how perfect you make the conditions. 

And it hit me that I was doing this covert thing that even my own conscious mind didn't recognize. I was waiting. I was working on myself, and it was helping, but the motivation somewhere under it all was – if I can just fix myself enough, things will be different and he will love me. The good news is – you should still do that. You should still focus on your own health and healing and actively try to remove yourself from a relationship in which someone is actively trying to push you away. So even if you have hope deep down that it will change things, maybe it will, but no matter what your motivation is – good or bad – it's always a good idea to focus on healing. 

But on Sunday night, it became clear to me just how gone he was and how not gone I was. I sat with eager enthusiasm that we would be able to have lots of conversations through ChatGPT, a website that saved my sanity in the thick of feeling lost and alone. And then I realized – communication is not our issue. Acceptance of one another and the very different way we approach life is our issue. 

He does not want a gal like me. I am a whole lot. And a whole lot from an unhealthy place leaves a mark. I won't focus on what I see as his part. It's not my story to tell. All I can say is that loneliness happens when who you are in the deepest part of yourself seems to be uninteresting and unacceptable to whomever you are with. The problem seems to be that we don't just exist. We exist in a context. We exist within the framework of who we surround ourselves with. So while I can grow and evolve and all the things, there will always be that part of me that exists as the person in my husband's eyes. And more than anything, we really need that primary relationship to be one in which we can feel ourselves held in a loving way through those eyes. 

No matter how much detaching I tried to do, because he was in my home, because I had to interact with him, and mostly because there was no finality to the situation, the hope that I could be loved by him lingered in the background. It created a slow leak in my psyche, draining me of my ability to grow past a certain point. 

Imagine a car. It's a beautiful old and classic car. You've had it for so long and it has held so many good and beautiful memories. And you don't want to get rid of the car, but it's requiring a lot of maintenance. Every day, you have to stop work early and tend to the car. You have to take care of it because it's reached a point where the air and elements and stresses are getting to it. You can't cover it up, you can't take it inside, you can't repaint it in a way that protects it – nothing you can do will save you from having to manually wipe down and tend to all the parts of this car for hours a day. You know that someday – if you had enough money, you could build a barn to keep it in or even just buy a car cover. You could have things rebuilt so they didn't require the hours of intense maintenance. But you don't know when or if that day will ever come. And you have no control over if it does. But you stop and look and realize that all of your time is being spent managing this car that you cannot even drive except maybe once or twice a year. Now it seems that all the new memories that you would like to make, like the ones you made in this old car, aren't possible because you are too busy hanging on. And you realize – it's time to let the car go. 

For me, I realized that the small hope he would give me by way of his uncertainty and indecision about leaving permanently was keeping me stuck. Because I was writing and doing and planning and maybe going to school to become a therapist! I was beginning to care for my body. I was able to really nurture friendships. These were all such great things! I would learn more and more every day about how to show up in a relationship. I would work hard to sit with whatever unresolved pain I had and try to pay attention in the ways it showed up with my kids. I was becoming a better mom, a better friend, a better me! This was all so, so good. If some is good – more is better, right? 

But it became very clear to me that so much of this energy to heal and be better and find meaning and purpose just for myself was a kind of swimming against the current. You cannot build compartments up in your life to be big enough, good enough, or fulfilling enough to make up for a compartment that is draining you of your ability to step fully into loving yourself exactly as you are. 

And because I know that my husband is the kind of person that could probably ride the fence for the rest of his life, I knew that I would have to be the one to formally call time of death. I was mistaking his ambivalence for love. I was putting all my hope in the idea that with enough time and patience, he would find his way back to me. 

I will have that hope when I sleep in the guest bedroom tonight. Will he care? I will have that hope when we decide to do separate vacations, when we meet with a lawyer for the first time, when we draw up the papers that always have that blue cover. I will cling to this hope when I sign it. I will cling to it even when I receive the final decree that declares that we are no longer bound to each other in any way besides being co-parents. But I will take each step until all of those things happen. Even though with each step I am hoping. With each step, I know that I could pull back the reins and possibly slow the process and give him more time to think. More time to decide if he wants me. I will have to take active daily steps to do something that feels so counter to everything that feels safe and familiar. I will have to do something that causes me active pain. I will have to do something while filled with doubt of whether it's the right thing or not. I will have to do something that goes against every fiber of my being. I will do all of that because I know that that hope is what is draining me. And I have enough of a sense of who I am and what my value is that I no longer need to wait around for someone to believe it too. I will have to walk through fire.