Passenging

The first time I went to Walmart after my divorce, I burst into tears in the paper goods aisle. There I stood, surrounded by families and carts and the chaos of Saturday morning errands, holding a roll of paper towels. I called a friend and cried.

“I don’t think I can do this,” I told her.

It was not the first time I had ever shopped alone. Throughout my marriage I had shopped alone far more often than with my husband. But for the first time in my adult life, I was there as a single person.

I married in 1989. My entire adult life — marriage, parenthood, relocations, holidays, illnesses, arguments, ordinary Tuesday errands — had unfolded inside the invisible architecture of being part of a pair.

I had no functional incompetence. I could work. I could pay bills. I could make appointments, attend to the tasks of daily life. What I lacked was not capability, but orientation.

We had a traditional marriage, not because we consciously sat down and designed it. The arrangement evolved over decades: a result of practicality, aptitude, repetition, and reinforcement. This is what many long relationships do. One person does the home repairs and maintenance, the other focuses more on the family structure, meal planning, children’s activities. In our case, living much of our lives in Texas, where there were snakes, fire ants, and large lawns that required constant attention, I left the landscaping to him. He preferred doing it anyway. The one time I attempted to to mow our two acres with the ride-on mower, I ran over a sprinkler head and created another task for him to fix over the weekend. So eventually I stopped trying.

Meanwhile, he had little interest in cooking, so I handled meals, childcare, domestic organization, the emotional texture of the home. His career brought in most of the income, so there were years when I stepped away from work, oftekon after a move, to build stability for our family in a new place.

The arrangement worked. That was precisely why it deepened.

But the equilibrium that allows a marriage to survive can come at the expense of individual flexibility inside of it. Over time, the identities inside the marriage become specialized, stabilized, reinforced, and less individually flexible. Stability and integration are not always the same thing.

There is you and there is me. And then there is the marriage itself — an organism that maintains its equilibrium by adapting its separate parts to perform certain functions. That adaptation becomes self-reinforcing.

When my husband first asked me for a divorce, we were driving through Bosnia on an isolated stretch of road through barren mountains. We stopped occasionally at lonely service stations where no one spoke English. Rocky hills stretched endlessly outside the window. I remember wanting to scream, wanting to jump out of the car and run, though there was nowhere to run to.

Of course he was driving.

He drove. I passenged. That was how our organism had organized itself over decades.

The divorce felt less like the end of a contract and more like a rupture in an ecosystem. The structure that had quietly organized my adult identity for thirty years no longer existed, but my nervous system still expected its presence. Because the real rupture was not the announcement itself. It was learning how to inhabit ordinary life after the organizing structure beneath it disappeared.

Eventually we came home. And that is how I found myself standing in Walmart on a Saturday afternoon, crying in the paper goods aisle.

The five years that followed have felt less like reinvention and more like the slow rerouting of neural pathways. Function returns, but differently.

It was learning how to tolerate silence on a Saturday evening without rushing to fill it.

It was taking tiny risks, like publishing a story.

It was slowly becoming less afraid.

For most of my life, I carried a deep, almost pathological, fear of death. It was not dying I feared, but of dying incomplete. Of dying while still passenging. Of dying before I had become whatever version of myself that I sensed had always existed somewhere, underneath the life I was successfully performing.

I did not know what that purpose was. I did not know what my integrated self would look like, or what a life organized internally rather than relationally might even feel like. All I had was a vague awareness that this is not all of me yet.

Recently, a man asked me over brunch whether I liked football.

He smiled as he asked it, anticipating the answer.

I smiled back. For the first time in my life, I answered simply: “No.”

He looked surprised, as though I had failed to follow a script I did not realize I had been performing.

The truth was, I had never really cared for football. For most of my life, though, I suspect I would have answered differently — not quite lying, but adapting, affiliating, smoothing the interaction before I had even fully thought about my response.

Five years after the rupture of a thirty year marriage, I still do not entirely know who I am. But I am beginning to recognize the feeling of a life organized more from the inside than from adaptation alone.

And that fear of dying?

Gone.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.