Eight months ago I packed up my husband’s belongings, placed them in a storage shed and changed the locks to our home. I discovered things that devastated me.  So I did what any self-respecting woman would do. I had a meltdown.

It’s hard for me to remember exactly how I felt last fall when I came to the decision that I needed to leave him. That’s the thing about time, it has a way of re-writing the narrative. I’ve spent so many weeks and months regretting the way I handled things. I would replay my words over and over again. As time went on, his own narrative would change too. And it wasn’t long before self doubt crept in and plagued my every thought.

Divorce is a profoundly difficult thing to endure. I’d argue it’s practically impossible to come out of it completely whole. A dear friend of mine told me that “divorce makes you feel like road kill.”  And she’s right. I’ll add that it makes you feel like road kill that’s been driven over, backed over, and driven over again.

I don’t remember this past winter. I heard it was the coldest one we’ve experienced.  I remember lying on my couch binge watching episodes of House of Cards and Orange is The New Black.  I slept a lot….I mean like…A LOT.  There was an entire week in January when I didn’t go to work at all. Turns out I actually came down with bronchitis….but I was too depressed to notice that at first. And truth be told, I didn’t really care. I was slipping away.

Through the help of an amazing therapist I began to realize that I was chaotically traveling through the various stages of the grieving process, lingering in the depression stage for days on end. Anger was my favorite stage. It felt productive, temporarily anyway. But the anger wouldn’t last. The bargaining stage brought some regretful decisions, some whiny phone calls to my ex, some scheduled visits over drinks….choices that proved destructive and set me back further in the healing process.

But I’m still standing. Friends of mine have admitted that they were worried about me and they simply can’t understand how I endured all that I did. And the truth is, I don’t know how I survived it either.  I mean, what choice did I have, really?  I suppose I had two choices: Give up. Or try to move on. Giving up wasn’t an option.

It’s now late-summer and I’m realizing just how much time I’ve wasted standing still.  And I’m done with that. I simply cannot waste another second of my life living in the past. I’ve made foolish choices during my grieving process. I clung to hope that wasn’t real. I beat myself up when I had no business doing so. I carried blame that wasn’t mine to carry. I drug myself like a rag doll through months of torturous mental abuse. But I am done with that. That was in the past – where it will stay.

And that’s what inspired me to start this blog.

I plan to fill this space with tales of new adventures. I want to challenge myself to live fully. To take steps that bring me outside my comfort zone. To meet new people. To discover new strengths that have most likely been suppressed over the years. And to never again allow myself to believe that I am worth less.

The adventures will be both big and small. Everything from learning how to take myself to dinner alone, to traveling to interesting places and maybe even running a full marathon…maybe.

I’m not going to plan out all of my adventures. I’m simply going to live and see where life takes me.  But along the way I’m going to pause and take time to capture the moment here, to reflect on it and to preserve it. If for nothing more than for my own awareness of how far I’ve come.

Thanks for joining me on this journey.