Sometimes Life Sucks…
Growing Older, Growing Wiser…IF You Keep This in Mind
Have you noticed that some people seem to find their inner zen and worldly wisdom as they age while others only seem to settle into negativity and bitterness?
Have you ever wondered why that is?
As we get older, there are two opposing forces that can impact our general happiness and outlook. Two divergent agencies both raising their voices to be heard.
Which one will you listen to?
The Voice of Life Lost
When I look around me, I see some people who have made it beyond middle age without suffering any major setbacks or losses. But only a few. I’m convinced that wrinkles are only partially due to thinning collagen and the relentless pull of gravity. I think wrinkles are the visible signs of the emotional scars we carry in ever-increasing numbers.
And as those hurts and losses begin to compound, it’s easy to become buried. Become embittered. It may seem that there is more lost than has ever been gained and the thought of trying again feels insurmountable. With so many difficult life experiences, everything can become tainted, turning the once-innocuous into a potential trigger.
Some people let this toxicity build like an algal bloom on a once-clear lake, blocking out all of the light and choking out all of the life. Their lives become a tally of what has happened and how they’ve been targeted by misfortune.
As they grow older, they become more agitated, more pessimistic and often as a result, more alone.
The Voice of Life Lived
And then there are those who listen to the other voice. These souls are no more fortunate, no less likely to have experienced hardship. They simply hear a different message.
They look back at their long lives with its many struggles with the gift of perspective. Perhaps they are able to see how something that was devastating at the time became a gift, even though it was unwanted and a great price, after the passage of the seasons. They view their myriad losses at part of the signs of a life spent giving and loving rather than focusing on what is no longer present.
Instead of questioning why things happened to them, they are able to look back with a sense of quiet pride that they made it through so many trials. And that confidence gives them the optimism that they’ll make it through the next one as well. With time and practice, coping skills and strategies have been perfected and practiced, using the difficult times as opportunities to become better.
Instead of focusing on what they don’t have with bitterness, they view what they do have with gratitude.
Thankful for every moment and every breath.
We all have both voices speaking to us, the proverbial devil and angel perched upon our shoulders. Which voice will you listen to – the one who counsels misery or the one that brings you inner peace and wisdom?
Why I’m Attracted to People With a Difficult Past
It happens to me all the time.
A knowing look between virtual strangers. Words left unsaid yet with full meaning comprehended. A nod to the side, understood to reference “all that”in the midst of casual conversation.
It says, “I see you. And I see that you have suffered. And even though I don’t know your story, I know that we are kin.”
People that have a past, that have been through stuff, have a way of finding each other. It’s a club none of signed up for, yet we now all know the secret handshakes and code words used to identify other members.
If I inventoried the people most important to me, their combined tragedies would fill a country music album. There are motherless children, those who have been abused and abandoned, people who are enduring long and painful and scary medical ordeals and others who have suffered great losses.
But suffering isn’t the only thing they have in common.
They also have the overcoming (or at least the first steps) of it.
—–
One of the reasons I was attracted to my first husband was that he had a maturity and perspective that comes from going through difficult experiences. It made him stand out from the largely affluent and untouched kids at my high school. As my own life experiences – a sense of abandonment by my dad, a health crisis and the unexpected deaths of several friends – compounded, I no longer felt as though I had anything in common with the average 16 year old.
Then I met him.
And we had that unspoken conversation. That handshake of pain. A meeting of eyes that had seen more than they should.
We didn’t feel as though we belonged in the worlds we inhabited. But we felt as though we belonged together.
It was an hysterical bonding of sorts. A grasping. A union born from suffering.
Of course, I didn’t see any of that at the time. I just knew that I felt understood. That he could relate to facing challenges greater than deciding what to wear the next day or what to do when you hadn’t studies for a test.
Little did I know that he would later become the source of my greatest life lesson to date.
—–
It’s completely natural for people that have difficult pasts to gravitate towards one another. After all, we often bond over shared experiences and beliefs. And we look for people that can relate to and empathize with our own situations.
That attraction isn’t always healthy; however, sometimes bonds formed from suffering become mired in suffering. The pain simply is transferred from one to another, keeping it nurtured and alive. Sometimes one person takes on a victim role and the other, needing to be needed, plays the savior. The past can become the seed that holds the relationship together and a reticence to release it (and possibly the bond) develops.
I see these unhealthy relationships like two weak swimmers trying to save the other from drowning. The combined efforts only seek to weight them both down.
—–
When I started dating again after divorce, I intentionally looked for men that didn’t have pasts. They were surprisingly common, those guys that had made through 30, 35 even 40 years of life relative unscathed.
They intrigued me.
But they didn’t attract me.
Sure, they weren’t as superficial and two-dimensional as a gaggle of sheltered teenagers.
They were perfectly nice and nothing was glaringly wrong.
But they also didn’t get it.
They had never had to face a loss that made every breath feel as though oxygen had been replaced with concrete. They had never been forced to dig so deep within themselves that they feared they would get lost before they got out. They had an easy assurance that everything was going to be okay. Because for them, it always had been.
I felt separate from them. Different.
And I also felt a strange need to protect them. To let them be in their unaffected worldview for as long as fate allowed.
They seemed fragile to me. Untoughened. Untested.
I was equally uninterested in men who still lived in their pasts and showed no signs of wanting to move on or those who tried to pretend that it wasn’t a big deal. I knew what happened when suffering was damped down and pushed aside – my ex taught me that one. And I had no desire to live someone else’s past.
I found myself attracted to men who had been through the lows of life and had climbed out, one difficult step at a time. Someone who also knew how bad it could be and yet hadn’t given up. Someone who developed strength with every step and wisdom from every glance back. Someone who wouldn’t pull me down or carry me along, but who would walk with me.
We’re often dismissive of difficult pasts as being unwanted baggage.
Yet often the people with the most to carry have the greatest spirits.
—–
When I look around at the amazing people I choose to have in my life, I’m blown away by their resilience and attitudes. I surround myself with them because they understand and also because they inspire.
March Reading List
I’m still not quite ready to start writing again. The raw shockiness has passed. I hope.
It hit hard this morning- my first morning at home in over 18 years that didn’t begin with my cat on my lap. I crawled back into bed for a bit for a good cry and a hug before I was ready to face the day.
For the most part, I just feel that scooped-out void. And I’m reminded all over again why it is called heartache. The chest literally aching from the loss.
And of course, I’m also brutally reminded of the fact that every loss carries echoes of the ones before. After a certain age and/or life experience, there’s no such thing as a singular grief.
While I’m adapting and acclimating, I leave you with some of the interesting articles that have come across my feed in the last few weeks:
Stop Yourself From Crying With a Quick Pinch
5 Major Fears That Kill Relationships
10 Barriers to Intimacy and How You Can Break Them Down
21 Books to Read When You’re Going Through Heartbreak
And one I’m a bit dubious about, but I’d love to hear others’ thoughts:
Permission Granted
When I was a freshman in college, I spent a brief period in a grief support group. I was reeling from the deaths of over a dozen friends in the previous few years. There was a young man who had recently lost his mom to cancer and a woman whose brother was killed the previous year in a head-on collision. Three other women rounded out the group. They had all miscarried.
All of our losses, although different in degree and detail, had much in common. But there was one factor missing for the ones who had suffered the loss of their unborn child; they didn’t feel like they had the right to grieve. Either explicitly or implied, they had all received the message from people around them that theirs was not a “real” death and that their level and duration of grief should match that fact. Their grief, rather than being supported, was minimized.
Unlike the rest of us, who were deemed “faultless” in our losses, these three women had faced accusations and associated guilt that they were somehow at fault. That they were responsible for their loss. They had the added burden of a sense of culpability and a target for blame.
I ached for these women.
Their loss was real. Their pain was real.
And the fact that their pain was downplayed and finger-pointed made their grief all the more real.
A divorce is a death.
Not of a person.
But of a marriage.
It is loss of the possibilities of the future.
It is collapse of a partnership and a family.
It is the cleaving of lives and often self.
And part of what makes divorce so difficult is that it is the demise of a marriage and yet there is a stigma attached to grieving its loss. There are no wakes, where loved ones gather and offer support. There are no obituaries published to disburse the news and quiet the rumors. You garner uneasy looks in you mention how you miss your spouse, especially if he or she is playing full-on offense in the divorce. There are no established rituals for mourning a marriage (and I don’t count the uptick in the often-gaudy “divorce party” a grieving ritual). And there are certainly no memorials planned.
It is a complicated grief. The person is still alive, yet the memories are now tarnished perhaps beyond recognition. They become sort a walking dead.
There is always a questioning and doubt as to what you could have done to alter the marital course. And it is a tricky path to walk between responsibility and needless guilt.
You may feel confusion because you initiated the divorce and yet you don’t understand why you are so sad to see the end you hoped for finally arrive.
You hear statements from others like, “My divorce is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” while you’re still reeling from the loss and grieving in silence.
The loss is real. The pain is real.
And the fact that the pain was downplayed and finger-pointed makes the grief all the more real.
So hold a funeral for your marriage, a sign of acknowledging the end and a first step of letting go. Take some tangible piece of the marriage (no, not your ex!) and release it through burial or a funerary pyre.
Write a eulogy for your marriage, telling the whole story from hopeful beginning to bitter end.
Plant a memorial tree symbolizing your roots in the marriage and your limitless growth above.
Re-purpose a memento from the marriage to serve as both a memory of what was and a reminder that you can transform your future.
It’s okay to mourn your marriage.
It’s okay to grieve your loss.
Permission granted.
Lessons From the End of a Marriage 