I Opted for a Keyboard Instead of a Divorce Lawyer

Before we get too far into things, let me be clear. This is not the story of a woman who took to Medium to save her marriage. I am sure that those women are out there — or, in here — but I have not met them. While Medium is a killer place to find someone with whom to have an online affair, I’m not sure that writing here can save a marriage.

I am one of the scores of women writing on Medium after throwing in the towel on being a good girl. Writing on Medium was how I rebirthed myself after I left a relationship I began at seventeen (I am turning forty-five next month).

In 2024, my latest book, Compassionate Divorce, hits the shelves. It came through me in a torrent. I wrote the first third in 72 hours and spent the six months following transcribing the imprint that the muses had left on my heart when they blew through over that one long weekend. In another post, I’ll tell the story of the spiritual experience that was the inspiration for the book. Here, I want to build the bridge between who I’ve been on Medium until now and this exciting book.

Compassionate Divorce is a how-to guide for couples

who know they need to split but want to do so without destroying their lives. In between chapters on “Who Gets the House” and “Modern Approaches to Alimony and Child Support,” I share parts of the story of my own marriage and divorce, which was, as you might have guessed, “compassionate.” However, the secret that I keep in the book, which I can tell only you, is that writing on Medium is what made my Compassionate Divorce possible. Start to finish, there were no lawyers involved.

When I decided to leave my unhappy marriage, I was a mother

of two living in a foreign country. The move had been a last-ditch effort to save the marriage (yes, my therapist told me it wouldn’t work…). I had spent long months feeling devastatingly alone as my ex entered a downward professional spiral and I was left to navigate life alone in a foreign language and foreign culture.

As a product of the “staying for the kids” approach to marriage, that strategy was not an option for me. I don’t believe that non-functioning marriages benefit children. On the contrary, in the best-case scenario, non-functioning partnerships give kids a model of partnership that is cold and often choked with resentment. In the worst-case scenario, they can create homes that are downright toxic environments for kids.

Divorcing 7,000 miles from home meant that even if we were no longer married, my ex was still the only family that was less than an ocean away. What is more, by the time we chose to split, we were living our dream life. Though the marriage had failed, we had succeeded in joining exactly the kind of community in which we wanted to raise our kids. I wanted out of the marriage, but I didn’t want to give up on those dreams.

Thus, Compassionate Divorce was born.

The key ingredient in Compassionate Divorce is a mode of patience that can often feel superhuman. My own divorce took almost five years. What is more, because we were deciding to stay a family even though we were no longer a couple, changing my name was not something I considered at any point.

Instead, I found Medium.

It was on the pages of Medium that I found a world in which I could recreate myself. I took on a new name (Sarene is a pen name) and I began to get to know people through our words alone. This is the piece that I wrote about it all just a few months after I joined Medium when I was still using poetry to reveal/conceal my reality.

While I hope that most of you reading this do not find yourself right now in the throws of divorce (though if you do, PM me, and I’ll send you a draft copy of Compassionate Divorce), I suspect that my experience on Medium is more common than one might initially expect.

Medium represents for me the best of this Brave New World in which we find ourselves, where geography is almost irrelevant and where words can create worlds. While in some ways, you could argue that Sarene is a mask I wear as a writer, for me, I became her to set myself free.

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This post was previously published on Compassionate Divorce.

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