it's the fear

I lied a little, you know, in my last post. It does take a lot to make me happy - if a lot means truth, passion, risk, intellectual stimulation, friendship, laughter, love. I imagine those of you who know me well snorted a little when I wrote it doesn't take much to make me happy. Much indeed. I wish it were as easy as a damn Bird of Paradise.

Lately, letting go is excruciatingly hard. Just when I think I’m fully facing forward something shifts in my atmosphere, and I’m hovering again in the past. It isn’t just the guilt from drastically altering two lives in ways they’d rather not have altered – although there is that. It isn’t even the awareness of awaking alone most mornings this past year – although there is that, too. It isn’t doubt or financial ruin or residual anger or disappointment or self-judgment– I mean the fallout from those certainly nest inside but isn’t causing this latest strain. I think maybe it is the fear. Fear of being wrong again. And fear that I’ll have dragged myself and my ex and our little one through this massive, painful change only to have our lives different but not necessarily better. What if mine is the only one better? What then?

I want to believe that divorce doesn’t invalidate a decade’s worth of choices – of feelings and declarations and struggles that might have been fruitless but were waged nonetheless. I’d like to be able to believe I can move forward with lightness provided from my past rather than this heaviness that is sitting on me now. I’d like to believe I won’t repeat the same mistakes, but right now – today – I am uncertain, and the limitless future that usually excites is instead looming large. Scarily large.