wistful melancholia & blank slates
on divorce, identity crisis, & figuring it out (just keeping it light)
It feels like all of my best ideas come to me as soon as I’ve resolved to sleep in earnest. I don’t know when I became a nocturnal animal, but it seems like it was somewhere between listening to ‘The Bald and the Beautiful’ in my rented Kia and laughing so hard that I had to pull over on Kamehameha Hwy, and numbly reviewing separation agreement drafts on my laptop while scrolling through apartment listings on my phone as the last days of summer wither with the leaves.
The latter feels both like a hesitant epilogue to this life and an angst-riddled foreword to my next one. I reconcile two warring emotions daily; on one hand, I feel like a panicked animal who just heard the trap snap shut behind me. On the other, I'm filled with a sense of anticipation and promise that I haven’t felt since collecting the keys to my first college dorm room; an adolescent kind of hopefulness.
On my bad days, I’m victimized by my deep-seated mistrust in myself that manifests as a pernicious propensity for anxiety but masquerades as a sensible, morally praiseworthy abundance of caution. I pointedly do not ask for anyone’s opinions because I am a self-aware diva (good). However, I can’t spend more than twenty minutes being present with myself (bad), so I avoid the mortifying discomfort of confronting an uncertain future by promising myself that I’ll think about it later. (Spoiler alert: I won’t think about it later.)
I succumb to leucocholy, then I blink and it’s somehow three in the morning again. I hollowly promise myself once more that I’ll Do The Thing tomorrow (and I mean it this time!!). Unsurprisingly, I do not do Do The Thing, and the cycle repeats.
On my good days, I listen to ‘Strangers Like Me’ by Phil Collins (the Tarzan soundtrack goes unreasonably hard and I’ll die on this hill) while I dance around my room, and my eyes well up when he croons, “I just know there's something bigger out there.” I find myself wondering who I want to be, and in my brain, my habitation choices influence this new role I’ll cast myself in.
Am I an avant-garde-bohemian-socialite-slash-tortured-artist who embraces the ephemerality of the present and accepts the ambiguity of the future? This character dives headlong into the buzzing whirlwind of city life. She lives in an open-concept loft downtown with high ceilings, enormous windows, and an almost garish amount of exposed brick.
She pole dances, takes pictures of her friends with film cameras, laughs too loud, and communicates directly. She’s bold, enigmatic, and courageously optimistic. She doesn’t give a fuck.
Or am I a contented creative and reformed romantic embracing the peaceful quiet found in the broad tree-lined streets of suburbia? She prefers a home with character: hardwood floors; stained glass; Victorian crown moulding; a decorative fireplace; or maybe a solarium where she can read in a papasan chair amongst her swaths of verdant houseplants as the snow pirouettes silently outside.
She hosts themed dinner parties, writes in the park on her lunch break, is a proud dabbler (she’s learning to make stained glass art and to rebind books this month), and prides herself on her overflowing yet expertly organized bookshelf and her ability to pull a clean espresso shot. She’s pragmatic, thoughtful, and creative. She really, really gives a fuck.
I can picture myself as either of these two characters clearly enough*. I also don’t have to look too closely to see that they’re just magnified abstractions of the pieces of myself I like best. But then The Fear worms its way through my insides and pushes my heart into my throat and I’m left to contemplate a third option: Am I a melancholic, chronically ill, insomnia-addled ennui-slash-wannabe-writer (also known as a hack!!!) who is too paralyzed by her own catastrophizing to brush her teeth?
This antagonist preoccupies herself with dissociative daydreaming; solipsistically worries about worrying both silently and –to the chagrin of absolutely everyone around her– out loud; wallows in cowardly nihilistic resignation as a fettered prisoner of late-stage capitalism; rationalizes and even romanticizes her own personal brand of neurosis; and tries too hard to be funny on Twitter.
She compulsively replays every social interaction and self-flagellates over every perceived misstep; spends too much time hungry, over-caffeinated, and in the fetal position; and is not fun at parties.
(*I don’t know why my inclination is to compartmentalize myself to fit neatly into a category. Maybe it stems from a desire to be easily understood and therefore palatable. Maybe it’s a symptom of something – certainly, the internet would think so.)
I’m sure all of this sounds rather melodramatic, but to add a little context: I’m twenty-eight years old and I have never in my (relatively short) tenure as an adult lived alone. Logically, I know that loads of people –if not the majority of people– have lived alone; it cannot be that hard, but I am afraid anyway. I have a vague yet short window of time left to choose where to go from here and who I want to be right now. The looming yet irritatingly ambiguous deadline circles overhead.
If that existential crisis weren’t enough, there are also all of the dull-yet-daunting administrative tasks associated with being a newly single person that leave me exhausted when I think too much about them; i.e., changing my name, taxes, adjusting 401k contributions, health insurance, car insurance, etc. (Spare me.) Not to mention the whole, you know, no-longer-having-a-life-partner aspect of divorce.
My feelings about the dissolution of my marriage are complicated, but at the moment, the whiplash-inducing volatility of the early grief stages has quieted into what I’d describe as a disappointed resignation, or more simply: acceptance.
We have eight years between us, a journey punctuated by cairns we’ve built together along the way. Amassing somewhere around three thousand shared days made up of hand-written messages of both love and idiocy on post-its and whiteboards; nights swapping lore over cheap wine and Spotify queues; long road trips filled with meandering conversation about everything and nothing; mutually agreed upon television commentaries during which we predict plot twists with uncanny accuracy; roommate-type spats over laundry and where the vacuum should live; and in-jokes so thoroughly ingrained that we can’t quite remember their origins, there’s an inevitable kind of mundane yet rare, deeply comfortable intimacy that I’d liken to the mystical proverbial “oneness.”
You develop your own culture, your own language. Morning coffee becomes a sacred ritual. Shared milestones help shape your unified mythology. Most days, I wouldn’t be able to discern which idiosyncrasies he borrowed from me or pinpoint where his mannerisms bled into mine and vice versa. We’re each a hopelessly entangled amalgamation of our shared selves.
I remember me-before-him in an abstract, one-dimensional way. She feels like a stranger to me, which is both poetic and tragic at the same time. The simple fact is that by loving and challenging each other, we each had a hand in shaping each other, for better or worse.
I’d like to think it was mostly for the better, but when all is said and done, we don’t like each other very much. I avoid thinking too hard about the deeper implications of this fact.
When I look at the chasm separating me from my unknowable future as a bachelor (gn), I no longer feel like I’m wearing wings made of wax and feathers. The fog of sentimentality and fear has cleared, and I can see that my ex isn’t my person anymore. And that’s okay.
Something about the inevitability of change, something about ideally holding each of the people we love through their different seasons, something about growing pains and the grief of looking at a person who you once thought of as an extension of yourself and seeing a stranger. Something about loving yourself enough to realize you deserve better.
I’m not good at endings, so it’s fitting that this particular flaw of mine would be reflected here, too.