Original Post Date: January 24, 2018, Praia Verde, Portugal

“Before you can live a part of you has to die. You have to let go of what could have been, how you should have acted and what you wish you would have said differently. You have to accept that you can’t change the past experiences, opinions of others at that moment in time or outcomes from their choices or yours. When you finally recognize that truth then you will understand the true meaning of forgiveness of yourself and others. From this point you will finally be free.” – Shannon Alder

I’ve been looking at my marriage like a photo not quite in focus, trying to make sense of the ending. 

Asking myself, what led us there, how did it start to unravel, the why and how of it all…..I can’t stop thinking about it. 

Because it hasn’t been in focus for me, something feels missing, some element or clue that might help bring it into focus and help me understand it all.

You see dear reader, I am a seeker (no, not like in Harry Potter and quidditch, though that would be amazing)…..

I am a seeker of the heart. I want to know and understand things – specifically heart things and people things. 

I’m also a connector. I like to understand the whys of human nature, to connect the dots, connect with people. 

I like to learn, I like to understand, and apply the learned insights to continuously be a better human. 

I first heard this Maya Angelou quotation in a woman’s leadership program and it really resonated in my heart, ‘When you know better, do better.’

I have been feeling stuck, because I can’t see my way to doing better, because I haven’t fully been able to understand the why – it has felt like there was an important piece of the puzzle missing for me.

Edgy, sad and restless…..

Over the past two days – I’ve been edgy, moody, sad, listless, (luckily the weather has been mirroring my moods (or vice versa))…..and I couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong…..and so I scheduled a massage. 

And as I lay on the table, relaxing, and being cared for…..my mind settled, my heart settled, and then like pieces of a puzzle several little things started to layer together into that missing element. 

They were insights from selections of conversations over the past few months, memories from Facebook – flashbacks to happier times, photos in my phone, one in particular that kept bothering me – a dissonant chord amongst the rest…..and then all those clues layered together into the missing piece.

You see, when people ask what happened to us, what happened to my marriage, I reply frequently that life got the better of us. 

In truth, we’ve had three years of one intense life event after another, and as a good friend described it – our marital bank account was on empty and we had no reserve funds from which to draw to build our way back to one another. 

I made a career change, my mother died, we rebuilt our house, we discovered my husband had stage 3 cancer. He battled through that and fought it, I used it as an opportunity to leave my career to work with him in our family business so he could heal, and then….it all unraveled. 

We had lost one another, each more and more isolated from the other, until frustration, anger, insecurity, resentment and loneliness were all that remained for each of us. And when we both admitted we couldn’t take where we were any longer, he confessed that he was no longer in love with me and just wanted to be finished and start a new chapter.

And you see, the funny thing about it all, was that as much as it hurt to hear him say those things….on a very deep level, I understood and on an even deeper level, I had been expecting it. 

I had fallen out of love with myself as well.

When I looked in the mirror over the past 2-3 years, I no longer recognized the sad lady I saw reflected back at me. She was old, drawn, frowny, frumpy, blah…..none of the adjectives that I have ever associated with myself. She was a stranger. I was a stranger. 

So his feelings made sense to me – of course he fell out of love with me, I understood that, I could barely stand myself.

And deeper still on some level, I had been expecting it. 

You see, and I’ve only come to understand this recently – this is part of the picture that has been out of focus, I always expected him to fall out of love with me, because I never, ever, felt worthy of his love or anyone else’s love, ever. 

My two biggest fears/wounds have always been that I feel I am unworthy of love and that those that professed to love me would eventually discover my unworthiness and abandon me.

Staring into My Deepest Fears

I’m not sure I could have expressed these fears to you, dear reader, if you had asked me to name them. But through this process of grieving and self-discovery, I have learned those are their names. 

Through therapy, I’ve learned that they are common wounds for children with a parent who was not present during their upbringing. This separation can occur through death, disinterest, abandonment, or in my case, due to my mother’s escape into alcohol. Whatever the route of separation – it creates a deep and gaping hole in the heart of the child. 

While on some level I knew this, I wouldn’t have told you this for it would have been admitting that I didn’t have everything all together.

You see – one of the challenges with this type of wounding, is we the wounded, take different approaches to attempting to fill the void. 

And my particular method (and a very common one) is the ‘Let me prove to you that you should love me’ approach. 

And so I did my very best, to be the BEST, at anything and everything that I could achieve, in order to convince you and myself that I was worthy of love and affection. 

It is such an incredibly exhausting dance ‘Please see how great I am, Please won’t you love me?’….and unfortunately, it never works. It never fills the void. 

Because here is the crazy catch-22 of it all…..deep down, I knew I was wearing masks, so that made me a fraud, a marauder, something false and unreliable, an imposter waiting to be caught and found out. 

And so, no matter how much you loved me, I could never, ever trust or believe in that love, because I knew you loved someone that wasn’t real. 

It is a completely heart-breaking cycle and one that is hard to identify and fix.

I can see you, my friends and loved ones, shaking your head as you read this, saying to yourself, ‘How could she possibly believe that she wasn’t worthy of love?’ But oh, we can rationalize anything, especially about our wounds and our fears. 

I am so lucky to have an incredible cast of characters to call my friends….they are all a bit odd and zany, that is their charm, but it is also creates an easy excuse – ‘Well they love me because they are nuts.’ Sigh. Truth. 

But I also understood and could accept/justify their love because it wasn’t an every day, intimate kind of love. I could give them the best of me easily – shower them with love and affection, be a shoulder to lean on, be someone they needed in a pinch….and then return to my shadow world of not feeling good enough and they wouldn’t know. 

And several of them – the Ride or Die clan of closest friends, I knew they loved me….but it wasn’t enough love, or the right kind of unconditional/forever/belonging kind of love, to fill that aching void in my chest that remained.

And so I sought romantic love – and I sought it with a fervor. Those friends who survived my dating years with me, know how relentless and optimistic I was in the pursuit of love. 

I am a Romantic Seeking Heart Yearning type of Soul and I fervently hoped that if I found the right man to love me, and if he loved me unconditionally, (like they do in all the stories), then I would be whole. But it doesn’t work that way. 

I didn’t understand then that I was the only person who could love that gaping hole in my heart closed, that I was the only one who could give me what I was seeking, that it was my love, acceptance and approval I needed. 

I would have laughed at you – a nervous laugh to be sure, but I would have stubbornly shaken my head at your claims, ‘Of course I liked and loved myself.’ 

I would have answered about the masked woman and all her supposed perfections, ‘Yeh who wouldn’t love her, she’s great’ And secretly my guts would churn with the silent fear of discovery.

Interestingly this has been playing out over the past few months…..my friends shake their head in disbelief…how could he not love you anymore, you are wonderful and amazing, and then justify/explain it because we’d been through so much, we lost our way, it is a mid-life sort of thing, cancer and death are scary, it is a man thing….blah, blah, blah….and as each of you tried to buoy my spirits, and put the blame on the circumstances or worse on him, deep inside of me, my heart was shaking, screaming, ‘No, No, No, I am the problem, it was me the whole time’. 

But I didn’t have the words or proof to explain it.

And Then the Picture Came into Focus

And then on that massage table, the photo that has been this chord of dissonance came into my mind. You see it was a photo taken of me in January of 2015, two months before my Mother died. I was in Tulum, Mexico with my sister at a Yoga retreat. 

The photo was taken the last day of the trip. and what kept striking a chord with me – is how listless, dead-eyed, joy-less and un-Jaime I look in the photo. 

But this is a big deal because it was before all the external stuff started happening. This discovery of the timing shifted my previous understanding and suddenly everything started to come into focus.

My husband has asserted he has been unhappy for ‘awhile’. 

Such a vague word. It is so easy to associate any amount of time you might want with that word, like the past 3 years of external pressures and stress. 

But the truth that dawned on me yesterday started to be more distressing. 

What if ‘awhile’ equals 5 years, not 3 years? 

What if I had lost myself, long before the external circumstances started to occur? 

What if he had been unhappy and we had been disconnected for far longer than I realized? 

What does that do to the picture of our un-coupling? 

I will tell you it brings it into sharp focus. It is very humbling and painful to realize you were the architect of your own pain and sadness.

Now this was not on purpose, I didn’t know better – but I sure thought I did. 

I thought I knew everything. 

Let me do everything, I’ll take care of everything, I’ll be in control of everything, that way you can’t possibly see how much of a mess I am, how scared I am, how broken I am, how much of a fraud I am. 

And he let me. He let me do everything. 

But here’s what happens…..in my heart, I was longing for him to tell me ‘I love you for you, I don’t need you to Do, I just need you to Be you’……but I had conditioned myself To Do, and not to BE.

I needed to Do Less, to say No more, to ask for Help, to be Vulnerable, to be Real, to be Messy, to be Imperfect, to be Jaime. But I never trusted that he would love that messy, imperfect girl….because you see, in my head, no one else ever had. And more importantly, I never had.

All the other relationships (that mattered to me) had ended because I wasn’t enough – they all had fallen out of love with me too. And my friends loved me because they were crazy, so that was no help. And family love you because they have to, right? Again no help. So why would this person be different and love me more, longer, differently…..I wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe that it was possible, but that big gaping hole in my heart kept swallowing up his words, his actions, his love….and it was never enough to fill the hole.

And It is a Heart-Wrenching Truth

And looking back, I can see how hard that must have been for him. 

Because I know now that he loved me, he loved me very much, whether he knew all the parts of me or not, he loved me enough to stay when he was miserable, he loved me enough to stay longer than he probably would have otherwise. 

He loved me enough to try even though it hurt him to do so and not know why his love wasn’t enough. And I can remember his frustration and hurt when he’d say ‘I’m not sure what to say or how to show you that I love you’. 

And I didn’t know then that nothing he could have done, or said would have been enough, because I wouldn’t have trusted and believed it or him. There is nothing he could have done. He couldn’t have fixed me – I needed to learn to love myself.

And a funny thing happens when your worst fears come true and your deepest wounds are split open – my greatest fears were that I was unworthy of love and that he would leave me. And those fears played out in him telling me he wanted our marriage to end and he no longer loved me anymore. 

And I’m still here. And I’m getting through it. And I’m getting through it by loving and accepting him and finding my strength and self-respect. 

I’m getting through it by discovering who I am, and finding my inner joy again, and filling that deep wound inside with love and acceptance.

And that has been the craziest discovery of all – these past few months, I’ve stripped the masks away. I’ve got nothing to lose after all, I’ve already lost it. 

But I’ve stripped those masks away and said, whatever happens, I’m going to step out in the world each day authentically me, however she wants to show up each day. 

And I have accepted that I know very little (I could give Jon Snow a run for his money), and I have even less control. 

I’m asking for help, and leaning on people, and releasing myself from expectations, and I’m surrendering to my heart and to my feelings, and to whatever insights and discoveries come each day – no matter how hard they are to face and absorb. 

Even if that means sitting in public places (like on the bus yesterday and at dinner last night) with tears streaming down my face as the newest insight and understanding takes root in my heart. And this has been happening with a ridiculous frequency this past week. 

And I’ve discovered that while I may have been the architect of my pain and suffering, it also means I can be the architect of my healing and joy. 

And here is the craziest thing of all…..I’m learning to like myself, I might even love myself. And slowly that hole is closing up. The tears, the understanding, the soothing of the ache in my heart that comes from having the picture become more clear. And now I know better, so I can do better. And that is an incredible gift.

Sending out so much love and gratitude to my ex-husband, who loved me the best that he knew how, just as I loved him the best that I could. Our wounds just got in the way – which is how it works sometimes. ‘Thank you for always believing in me, even now, I’m learning to do the same. I’m so sorry I didn’t know how to believe in your love – I see and believe in it now, and I want the very best for you. Always. For both of us really. We both deserve it.’ 

Remember: You are the Architect of your Healing & Joy.

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, of unspeakable love.” – Washington Irving