How Conquering Divorce Gives You Confidence

Posted on by stilllearning2b
confidence

Whenever you successfully complete something that you thought you could not do, you gain confidence. Whenever you have to reframe your assumptions about your weaknesses and limitations, you fuel belief in yourself. Whenever you face your fears and survive, you acquire strength. And whenever you come through a struggle bruised and battered yet without giving up, you build trust in your abilities.

 

Divorce gives you plenty of practice in all of these. The end of a marriage is rife with authentic opportunities to build your confidence: 

 

Whenever we accept too much assistance, we sacrifice our self-confidence. But divorce gives plenty of practice in self-reliance. Because at the end of the day, you have to do it yourself.  You can accept help in everything from paperwork to counseling, but the talks with the lawyers, the tears in the night and the conviction to move forward are yours and your alone.

Divorce seems never-ending. The mountain seems insurmountable between the emotional process and the legal one. One step forward is often followed with a mudslide back. It’s a powerful feeling when you look back and realize how far you’ve come. Baby steps add up to marathons.

In many marriages, you grow to depend upon your partner as your go-to when you’re stressed or upset. But in divorce, that is the one person who cannot offer you the comfort you crave or the helping hand you desire. You have to do it all without the support of the person that you had always depended upon. 

Divorce is scary. It requires cojones just to face each day. You never know what may lie in wait around each corner and what demons you may be asked to slay. And if you have kids, it takes even greater courage to be the strong one for them.

When a marriage ends, it leaves no surface untouched. It affects every area of your life from finances to future. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is safe. It’s not easy living in a land of uncertainty with no firm footholds.

When you are partnered, you see yourself as your spouse sees you. You may accept his or her perceived weakness as truth and you may lose faith in your ability to conquer challenges. As you separate, you are forced to revise your self-image. And you will discover that you are stronger and more resilient than you ever imaged.

Made it through divorce? Here’s your trophy. You deserve it!

silver-trophy

A Compilation of Lessons

Posted on by stilllearning2b

It’s often amazing what we can learn simply by being observant and curious. Here is a compilation of some of my best lessons from some of the most unlikely of sources.

From my Vibram 5 Finger Running Shoes:

It’s Better to Feel What is Around You

In regular running shoes, the thick outer sole prevents any contact between your foot and the ground; you are barely even aware of the different environments underfoot.  In Vibrams, the thick sole allows you to discern the difference between soil and sand, asphalt and rock.  It makes for a more  fulfilling run, as you connect with the earth underfoot.  Likewise, allowing yourself to feel in a relationship makes the experience richer and more vibrant.  Be aware of what is around you, tune in to yourself and your partner, expose the soul. Read the rest of the post.

vibram-fivefingers-running-random-thoughts-from-a-part-time-vff-runner-3

 

From Selling Shampoo to Naked People:

Lesson: Acceptance

Teacher: Selling shampoo to naked people

How it went down: I grew up in an environment where nudity was acceptable. From a young age, I learned that the human body, in all its variations, was natural. I was taught that nudity could exist apart from sexuality and that an unclothed body was not a source of shame or embarrassment. I first appreciated this lesson one summer in early high school when I spent a few days selling shampoo to patrons at a nude sauna at the Oregon Country Fair. I was at the height of teenage insecurity about my appearance and my body. Yet, when standing alongside hundreds of other exposed bodies, my anxieties about my own form dissipated. I realized that I had been accepting others yet judging myself. I have generally had a positive relationship with my body and my weight and I believe that it is because of my early experiences with nudity. On a side note, somehow people wearing nothing but socks appear to be even more naked than those entirely in their birthday suits:) Read the rest of the post.

FacilitiesDiamondSaunafront

 

From Georgia’s “Little Grand Canyon:”

Big things can have small beginnings.

The canyon is not a natural formation, rather it was formed due to poor farming practices in the early to mid 19th century. The land originally consisted of gently rolling wooded hills. The early cotton farmers cleared the land of all existing vegetation and dug shallow furrows into the soil every planting season. Erosion took care of the rest. Now, almost 200 years later, the canyons are 150 feet deep and growing wider by 3-5 feet each year. Read the rest of the post.

photo-145

 

From The Dog Whisperer:

Work With Nature

According to Cesar, dogs process the world through their noses first, followed by their ears and eyes.  Obviously, we tend to use those senses in reverse and we all too often expect that from out pets.  Cesar advocated working with the nature of the animal so that you get the results you are looking for with the least amount of resistance.  Look around you.  Not everyone perceives the world the way you do.  Do you expect them to conform to you, or do you allow them to use their nature? Read the rest of the post.

 

From the Campgrounds:

It Takes Effort to Gain Perspective

Our campsite was located at the base of Table Rock Mountain, its visage towering over us in all its granite splendor.  Our first day was spent preparing the campground, we were in our little insular world.  The next afternoon after a long, uphill climb, we reached elevation where we could see our campsite and how it related to the larger landscape.  We tend to live life in its details and forget to look at the big picture.  It takes effort to gain perspective, but a climb to the top gives valuable information.  It’s worth checking out now and then. Read the rest of the post.

dec-2011-028

 

From the wake:

Accept Your Weaknesses

My primary excuse for avoiding water skiing over the years was my fear of losing my (very expensive and very necessary) contact lenses. On this day, I brought a pair of swim goggles. Rather than allow a weakness to hold you back, find a way to work around it. Read the rest of the post.

photo-62

From a Mechanical Bull:

Look Forward

The launched riders had a tendency to leave their gaze where they had been rather than look ahead. The talented guy kept his eyes looking straight ahead, even though straight ahead kept changing. Read the rest of the post.

 

From the Fencing Strip:

If you’re in a battle, it is a battle against yourself

Fencing is a bit deceptive.  You face off across a thin strip, mano y mano, waving swords in each other’s faces.  It would seem clear that your opponent is the masked person on the other end of the strip.  I soon learned that my true opponent was myself.  Each bout I strove to be better than I was before, regardless of who held the other weapon.  They were almost inconsequential.

The true battle was in my mind.  Against my own fears.  My own voice telling me I couldn’t do it.  I discovered that if I worked to win the battle in my head, the one on the strip usually worked out in my favor. Read the rest of the post.

fencinglisa

 

 

Something I’ve Never Admitted (Even to Myself)

Posted on by stilllearning2b

Something I’ve never admitted (even to myself) –

 

When my ex left, I was relieved.

Not right away. At first, I felt like I was breaking apart. Each breath singed my open and bleeding heart. I felt like I was gasping for air and grasping for a hold on reality. I was fractured and frightened.

But later? Once the wounds scabbed over a bit and I began to feel confident that I would survive?

I was relieved.

It wasn’t an emotion I expected to feel. In fact, I didn’t even accept as an emotion I did feel. On every conscious level, I loved and trusted that man with every fiber of my being.

But maybe on some deeper level, I was aware I was on a sinking ship.

A craft that I trusted to be whole and intact but instead had developed some fatal breach in its hull, obscured beneath the waters of awareness.

 

I lost everything. Yet in some ways I was relieved to be free of the life I had worked so hard for.

I loved him. Yet in some ways I was relieved he was gone from my life for good.

I faced immense pain and suffering. Yet in some ways I was relieved of the anxiety that had been growing beneath.

 

Maybe the relief was just my brain’s way of trying to wrest some control over the tsunami barreling down at me. Maybe the relief came from facing my biggest fear and still standing after the confrontation. Maybe I was relieved that the worst I could imagine was over and it could only get better from there. Perhaps it was the relief felt upon waking from a nightmare, the sweaty sheets revealing the anguish released during the night. Maybe it was like the relief felt after a good cry, emotions spent and endorphins moving in. Maybe it was the release of tension that I didn’t realize was building. Perhaps the relief came in an acceptance. A letting go after working so long to hold to him. Or maybe it was my intuition, discounted for so long, finally breaking through.

Who knows why I felt a release? I do know that I felt ashamed for feeling relieved. Guilty, as though I was somehow feeling something wrong. 

The truth is that emotions are messy and complicated. What we dismiss as irrational is often anchored in some truth, even if we cannot tease out the connections.

Relief is more than something we feel upon release, it is also a special type of carving that removes the unwanted material to create a dimensional image upon a backdrop.

I think the relief I felt was the removal of the unwanted falsehoods, letting my life and my self stand out yet again.

 

A Geographic

Posted on by stilllearning2b

Brock has been busy lately. Very busy. So when he had to drive to the other side of town this morning to drop something off for work, he invited me along for the ride. That’s life – sometimes quality time comes from a romantic evening out and sometimes it comes in the form of an hour plus on the highways of Atlanta (which even have traffic before dawn on a Saturday morning).

It was a quiet ride for the most part. The comfortable companionate silence between two people with nothing to prove who simply enjoy each other’s company. But it was also a journey to the past for me, as we drove from where we live to the area where I spent ten years of my former life.

I make that drive once a month or so to visit with friends or to attend some event. But usually I am either the driver or the sights are hidden beneath a shawl of darkness. This morning was different. The soft morning light had just brightened the sky when we made the turn into my old stomping grounds and, as the passenger, I had endless opportunity to peer between the trees to see what had remained and what had changed.

We drove by the street that was home to my first Georgia apartment where we served breakfast to the family who came into town to celebrate our wedding. We passed by my old library, where I checked out endless decorating books with the intention of turning our house into a home. I saw the biscuit place that my husband loved and the Costco where we went together every Saturday. We pulled through the drive through at the Starbucks where I met dates and sought public solitude after my divorce. And I caught a glimpse of the Gold’s Gym that was my sanctuary where I rebuilt mind and body.

I first heard the term “a geographic” relating to a need to pull up roots and start over somewhere new when I read Stephen King’s Duma Key. At the time I read the book, tucked securely in my other life, I didn’t understand that drive.

A few years later I understood it too well.

Once the reality of the end of my current life had set in, I felt an overwhelming need to escape. To run. To get away from every reminder and every location.

I wanted a geographic.

If I was going to be forced to start over, I wanted it to be fresh. Not built upon the dunghill of my former life.

Necessity kept me local for that first year; my job and my support system were nearby and needed. But that whole year, I felt restless. I no longer belonged. I needed to move. I was planning on a move to the West Coast, as far away as I could get in the continental U.S. But then love happened, and I cut my planned move short by about 2100 miles.

But it was far enough. As our morning drive took us through the streets of my old life, it felt like another world, another lifetime. It was distant yet interesting. I was curious rather than anxious. It held no pain, only far off memories. And it certainly didn’t feel like home.

I am feeling the pull for another kind of geographic right now. This semester has been way too frantic. I’ve felt pulled and prodded, trying to balance too much for too long. I feel the need to get away. To run. Not to another life, but to the woods for some quiet and simplicity. Life pared down to its most basic. Where the morning fire is often the most pressing item on the to-do list.

Peace. Hopefully without frostbite.

Sometimes we need to get away. Maybe for a few days. Or maybe for a lifetime.

Sometimes a geographic can help cure what ails us.

Portage

Posted on by stilllearning2b

I’ve spent a good amount of time on rivers. As a kid growing up in South Texas, tubing down the Frio or Guadalupe rivers was an essential part of every summer. I went whitewater rafting with friends and continued the tradition with my dad out West. When I moved to Georgia, I again spent time on the river, especially now with the Chattahoochee just down the road.

Rivers teach us about change. Unlike trails on land that stay static for months or even years on end, rivers swell and retreat seemingly with a mind of their own. Smooth waters are replaced with raging froth as boulders or logs divert the flow. Formerly deep wells become shallow graves lined with smooth stone when rainfall fails to meet the river’s demands. No matter how many times you have traveled those waters, they can still catch you by surprise.

A lesson I learned one summer rafting with a friend and her family on a river north of San Antonio. It was a stretch I had done before. In fact, I had even rafted it with her family on the previous summer. But this year was different. The usual drought had been relieved by drenching rains the week before and the river was full. Very full.

For the first part of the trip, we welcomed the swollen waters. You see, rafting (or even tubing) in Texas is usually broken up with intervals of walking the flotation device for a spell when the river becomes too shallow to support its draft. We used to joke about it being a sort of Texas portage. A normal portage is performed when the waters are too treacherous to approach and the craft is carried over land. In a Texas portage, the flotation device is simply carried over the small trickle of water while carefully stepping around the smooth stones that line the river bed until the water is again deep enough to support a craft.

So on this particular day on the river, we were simply happy that no Texas portages (portagii?) were necessary; the river was more than capable of carrying the raft with my friend and I, her parents and her brother. We were laughing and joking, eating soggy Pringles and drinking warm Cokes when we started to hear the noise. It started out as a dull roar, almost like bad reception on the car radio. But soon the noise was unmistakable. Water. Whitewater.

The recent rains had turned an upcoming portion of the river into a raging torment, made even more unpredictable by the damns created by debris moving down the river. Throwing the Pringles down, we scooped up the inadequate paddles and frantically rowed the boat ashore, narrowly escaping the tumultuous waters and our increasing panic. Where we carried the raft through the brush and bramble of the shore until we could safely place it back onto the water where we continued the remainder of the trip without incident.

That was my first real portage.

It wouldn’t be my last.

 

Our success on a challenge is greatly influenced by our view of the trial. If we see every section of impassable whitewater as an insurmountable obstacle, we will either remain stuck above the falls or find ourselves dashed on the rocks below.

But if we realize that the perceived obstacle is simply a detour in our plans, we will gather up the necessities and portage until it is safe.

Like the river, our lives often change without warning, causing us to leave the flow and construct a new path. Portage is not a sign of failure; it is a sign of acceptance and faith in the journey.

Sometimes you have to leave where you are to get where you are supposed to be.