When you lose everything, the immediate reaction is to replace. There is an urgent need to reinstate yourself, as if having your life turned upside down is only a fleeting moment of imbalance that some minimal re-footing will correct. But it doesn’t work that way.
My ex-wife ended our marriage unexpectedly sixteen months ago. I turned down her offer to remain married on paper and stay alone in the house I had bought and furnished for us in Croatia (she expected me, in return, to subsidize an apartment for her, because her new job wouldn’t cover all her expenses). Instead, I loaded my car and left for Austria. We were divorced two months later.
It was terrifying to look into this black hole of inevitable loneliness and material loss and accept it. But I had no choice. Mentally and emotionally, I was left in a perpetual tailspin. I needed to get somewhere to hunker down and take time to rethink, recalibrate, rebuild.
Two years earlier, right at the start of COVID, I had walked away from my job. For five of the nine years I had been with the company I had over-delivered on the requirements for promotion. But I was not promoted. I called time. We sold the apartment and most of what we owned and left Chicago to return to Croatia, her birthplace and the place we had met.
We did this on the basis of a simple agreement. We would set ourselves up to live a quieter life, with a garden and fruit trees and our two dogs and cat. Once the pandemic ended, we would travel as much as we could afford. And because I had saved enough money for us, and because Croatia was affordable, neither of us would get a job. The mantra became: Nothing can screw this up but us.
But she had an agenda all along that she kept to herself. She found a job anyway. And once settled into it, she sent me a text message with the lifestyle offer. Our marriage had died without a whimper. Because it had only ever been a marriage on paper, never a relationship.
I paid a heavy price for my blindness. To discover in short order that your career and then your marriage were both gaslit frauds is destabilizing, to say the least. So my response wasn’t too surprising. I lost the little trust I still had in people. I sought to isolate myself from harm.
But curiously, I rebelled with a get-back-on-the-horse kind of mentality. Like a reflex. I searched for a replacement. I forced myself to meet people. I sought to integrate. And I saw a therapist a few times to help me understand what I had done to myself.
Because that was the whole point. In hindsight, everything became clear:
I had frittered away nine valuable years of my life on a company that had likely never intended to promote me. Equally, I had frittered away sixteen years of my life on a woman who never loved me.
All of the diabolical things that happened to me in both situations (and there were plenty), I alone was responsible for. I had done it to myself. And I needed to find out why. This was the rethinking that I needed to do.
The only thing I had going for me was a novel I had started four years earlier. Which, given the lottery-like odds of ever getting published, isn’t a lot. But I enjoyed it. I recognized the cathartic value of the effort to make sense of my chaotic life. And I relished the opportunity to learn again, something which had stagnated in my career long ago.
I began by reading a couple dozen books on how to write a novel. I sketched out my characters and outlined some scenes. I hashed out an ending to give myself a goal to reach and just enough confidence to write down the first word of a book.
Then I started hammering away. Half-possessed, I cranked out page after page of drivel, thousands of words steeped in self-pity and self-loathing and self-absorption. Exactly what many agents and publishers must see as debut novels far too frequently.
I wrote close to a million words. I drafted and re-drafted. I sought help from an editor who opened my eyes to my many tangents and guided me in narrowing down the story to its core themes and narrative. Most importantly, I listened to what my writing was telling me. And the story’s ending changed to reflect that.
The sudden divorce had rattled my purpose but didn’t derail me. The work kept me sane. This proved to be the recalibration, both for the book and myself. I launched a final rewrite during the summer, and earlier this month I finished the book. The culmination of a five-and-a-half-year effort.
There is a lot of learning in all of this. Which I believe will carry me through the rebuild.
Over the last sixteen months, I have faced severe isolation and loneliness. But as time passed, I understood the tremendous value of this time spent alone, time without the distraction of deep-seated dissatisfaction and unhappiness, and the unresolved (and unacknowledged) traumas of others.
In a short time, I have reunited with the man who had existed inside me all along. Frustrated and mute, but always on the verge of emerging, I rediscovered the childish wonder and joy that had withered before the perils of each adult year, and like a stranger you’re sure you recognize, met myself again.
What I learned is that to run to a new relationship, any relationship, to immerse myself in the shallow demands of employment as I had done in the past, to travel relentlessly without specific intent or purpose, which I flirted with doing this year, to distract myself from myself in any way is evasion, retreat. It’s a gentle but debilitating form of cowardice.
I had stage four cancer fourteen years ago. I fought for my life and live with the scars. Some people consider this brave; others believe traveling solo is brave. It’s a matter of perspective. But neither is what I would call bravery. When I heard the diagnosis and was made to understand the unlikelihood of survival, I convinced myself I would survive (as most of us would do). But I didn’t face it squarely like a front-line soldier in the trenches. I kept working, joining calls, banging away on my laptop, keeping up with emails. I watched TV. I wrapped myself up in a cocoon of the ordinary.
By immersing myself in the monotony of everyday humdrum existence, I distracted myself from the biggest and potentially self-defining battle of my life. And when I survived the treatment and was given the all-clear, I returned to work, almost as if nothing had happened. And that was my mistake.
Because when you have a death-defying experience, when you come face-to-face with the transience of your brief and only existence, it should leave a mark. If the life you are leading is not the one you would choose, then it should be a wake-up call. At the very least, even if you believe you are leading the life you want, it should trigger an assessment, a re-evaluation in case some adjustments need to be made.
Losing everything as I have is the result of shirking this responsibility to myself. It has taught me the meaning of life living for you when you don’t live it yourself. This past year has been one of the best in my life. Simply because I’ve been living it.