My thoughts on January 6th have nothing to do with the insanity at the White House. They might have a little to do with the after-effects of the holidays. But, they fully have to do with the hardest choice I ever had to make.
You see, it was three years ago today that my cell phone rang. I was having lunch in a little diner on the West side of Chicago, prepping for some exciting meetings with the forest preserve. These were meetings that were going to give me a lot of work in the future, training and coaching forest preserve volunteers and naturalists. I was anxious and excited.
But I was also anxious about something else. And that something else was related to the phone call. He was on the phone. He had just gone through a heart cath and had planned on getting stints placed. But the doctors found too much blockage for stints and decided on a quadruple bypass instead. All of those decisions happened without my presence in the room, in the city where he was, or in the state where he lived. I was far, far away from him.
And he had been my lifeline. For years, he had made me feel beautiful, intelligent, and worthy. For years, we had worked together and every experience had felt like magic. Yes, it was hard work, but it was beautiful at the same time. My creativity was not just appreciated, but worthy of being paid for!
That day, in that little greasy spoon restaurant on the West side of Chicago, I broke. I realized that my hopes and my dreams were never going to be realized.
I had put all of my eggs into the wrong basket.
Not only would I no longer have him to work with for the coming months, but he would also be nursed back to health by his wife…yes, he was still married, regardless of all of his promises. And I knew what I had to do.
He told me I couldn’t come and be with him while he recovered. He told me it would be too awkward. Of course, I thought, but it was ME!!!…the woman he wanted. I was not allowed to be there with him or for him.
I’d been relegated to a silent girl on the sidelines yet again. And I was devastated.
For the past 2 years, plus, he had taken me, the silent girl on the sidelines, and taught me to sing my own songs, to write my own words, and not apologize for them. Inch by inch, my soul had been liberated.
And with a few words, he took that power back. He un-liberated me that day. My power slinked into the shadows.
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She nursed him back to health. He was well again. “Now”, he said, “now we can be together”. But there was nothing in my ethical framework that allowed for that. It was not going to work.
I lost him. My heart was completely shredded. My lifeline disappeared as he stormed off of our Zoom calls as the months passed. He could not convince me that he was ever going to leave her. Not now. It made me sick to even think of it.
He yelled at me, saying, “We will never find this again. You know that, right?!” And he was likely correct. I’ll never experience that again.
Feeling that safe, that beautiful, that loved, that seen, and that worthy, was a dream that turned into a nightmare.
Three years ago, and so much has happened since. It’s like another lifetime entirely. With his exit from my life went all financial stability. Then, the divorce that had already taken a year, required two more and money I’d have to borrow to pay. Then, I lost my home.
…
That slippery slope has landed me in 2023, filled with grief, yet tinkering with hope. Hope for what, I don’t quite know. But I want to hope.
It wasn’t a death sentence, that decision I made three years ago, today. But it was a death. It was the death of some beautiful moments in my life. It was the death of so many hopes and dreams.
It’s hard to even imagine a life like that anymore. A life in that I feel so loved and so beautiful and so safe.
But in the same breath, I feel proud of myself. I feel proud of my choice to live and choose according to my conscience. My gut ruled that day, regardless of how much my heart hurt. And that is something I can hope will continue.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash