Last time, I talked about acceptance. This post takes a deeper dive into how my thoughts on the breakup have colored how I would tell the story of it at any given time. People point out all the time that if you ask five different witnesses of an event what happened, you’ll get five very different stories. I find it fascinating, though, that if you ask the same person to recount a certain event at five different points in time, you will also get five very different stories.
How I see the breakup has continually evolved over time. I think that’s probably pretty natural, especially given that there was so much manipulation going on. It used to be that I was more in tune with his needs and desires than my own. This made it really hard for me to choose to leave him, even once I acknowledged that’s what I wanted. I kept weighing my desire to leave against his desire to keep things as they were. I find writing my thoughts and feelings down helps me process a lot better than if I keep them in my head, so I journaled a lot during this confusing time.
On October 19th, 2019, I wrote, I woke up and realized, for the first time, that I love myself. This was the first day of my entire life that I loved myself, and so it was also the day I began to seriously consider getting divorced. My ex did not treat me the way I wished to be treated on almost any level. And yet on this day, I also wrote, I still honestly believe he is a good person, and I don’t want to hurt him.
That’s right, my self-contradictory stance was that 1) my husband was not going to change to be respectful and kind to me and 2) my husband was still a good person who was a good dad and deserved a painless, equitable parting from me.
As time went on, the idea that he was a good person became harder to defend. Just days before the breakup, I wrote this, trying to twist myself to keep seeing it that way:
The protagonist gets
their heart broken.
The other’s pain
lies unspoken.
By torching your dreams
I’ll rise anew.
I’ll be the bitch of this tale—
a phoenix, too.
I was so proud of this poem. Even in such a dark moment, I was playing—playing with perspective. One person’s villain is another’s hero. The second to last line references our first major fight, where he called me…well, you get it. In reclaiming that label as my own I took some of the sting out of that past trauma. But I was still centering him as the protagonist, who was getting hurt.
During the breakup, he threw every argument and every accusation he could at me. Couldn’t I see that wanting to leave him made me a sinner? Exhausted, I said, “God will forgive me.” My guiding light through the shame of causing so much pain was the faith that God would understand what I was going through. He would excuse what He could and forgive the rest. I was doing what was right for me, even if it was morally wrong.
For a long time after the breakup, I prayed for my ex. Over and over again, day after day, I prayed that God would crack his heart open and heal him. I could see all his pain lying below his anger, fueling it, and I felt sorry for him. I likened myself to Mary Ward, who according to Treasury of Women Saints by Chervin, prayed more for her enemies than for her friends. I praised myself for my radical empathy. I thought I was being so kind.
He tried, over and over again, to hurt me. He saw me as his enemy and tried to tear me down. He felt no shame hurting our children in his attempts to hurt me. His go-to, his one approach, was to let his anger guide him. Eventually, I wasn’t able to empathize anymore. Anger came raging back. I don’t care how much pain he’s in, I thought, There’s no excuse for this. I stopped being able to feel sorry for him. That frustrated me, because that was my angle into forgiveness.
My view of things became self-consistent. Now, I don’t think he’s a good person, and I think I was right to get out. I think it would have been prudent and just to have been a little more hard-hearted in my approach to the breakup. My desire to lessen his pain and to be equitable with him led to me making foolish decisions early in the divorce proceedings which cost me heavily later. For a while, I would have told you that the pain I caused him was him finally getting what he deserved.
Healing isn’t linear, and neither is forgiveness. Especially when the person keeps hurting you.
But the thing about forgiveness is, it’s not really there to help the person being forgiven. It’s there to help the person doing the forgiving. Letting anger and hatred fester inside you will make you ill. That is, after all, much of what I found objectionable in my ex. Why, then, would I do the same thing? I’ve forgiven him again. I don’t wish harm on him. I hope he can find a way to heal.
Today, I see the breakup as me smashing the cage I was in and getting free. Yes, it was ugly and destructive. I caused a lot of pain, but I don’t feel bad about having done so. It was completely necessary for me to thrive. Every night since, I have been glad he is not in my bed. Every day since, I have been glad I don’t have to serve or appease him. The breakup is when my real life began. It’s when I started taking responsibility for my own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and rejecting responsibility for those of anyone else.
Are there any experiences you’ve had that you would have reported differently in the past than you would now? And do you have any thoughts on the nature of forgiveness?