Day 5

Day 5 – Even my hair is getting curlier. I just got out of the shower; curliest day yet, which I attribute to my new general breaking the rules attitude.

I had coffee with my friend Karina today. She gave me a present she purchased from a flea market this morning: a Berlin scarf.

This is the first time I’ve seen Karina since she got back from visiting our friend Clare in Berlin who moved to there with her husband and has been living and making art there for 2 years. Karina said she told Clare that I was different than how I was a couple years ago. Clare is a special person. She had a psychic vision about my future that she intimated to me, coincidentally, the morning I decided my marriage was over. It was a big vision and her words gave me fortitude and courage I needed at the time.

After coffee with Karina, I considered how I’d changed myself from an unhappy person into a happy one. Since my divorce, I worried that I’d gone back to exactly who I was before I got married. Re-initiating a life of grasping, suffering, and irreverent faithlessness. But then I got so tired of that. I got tired of responding to the question posed to me at parties, “What have you been up to lately” with the same tired answer, “teaching and working on my book.” I felt stuck and like my life was not one I created. But it was, of course, everything in my life is the result of a decision I made or position I put myself in, minus the normal ups and downs, brightness and dimming of events outside our control.

Karina said I used to be so anxious. I remember myself chain-smoking, drinking like a fish, and frantic to get into a relationship.

I’ve always had so much energy and desire, but I didn’t have confidence or a direction of where to put it. I wrote an epic poem titled Barf, Sexually, which employs the refrain, “what do you do with your love?”

I mean, where does one put her devotion?

Also, where do you put it? I’d like to know—feel free to leave comments 😉

I started thinking about the practical application of my transition into a more mindful, purpose-filled person, the things I actively did to change my outlook.

Namely I started meditating and practicing yoga. That lead to more and more spiritual work, to learning how to be still with myself even through the fear, which I saw underlie my every thought and action. Meditating and practicing yoga brought me from worrying and over-thinking to trusting and staying present, how that makes me feel like the world is full of possibilities, how I am not locked in one small self and one small story, but as Whitman wrote in the poem Song of Myself, “I contain multitudes.”

Early into my daily meditation practice, maybe three months, I had a voice come through to me, it was my own voice and it answered my question, what do you do with your love? It said, “It’s easy: you love.” That was it. “Sophie, you love.” Don’t worry about the how.

Don’t worry about funneling that love into a particular receptacle that is probably too small because anything you can imagine is too small. It is small because it is limited to what you know, while the open contains the truths you do know and the ones you could never have imagined. The unfathomable is the source of hope.

How did this all happen? Certainly not just from getting divorced. But that was the catalyst. When that life-path failed, I swept it out of the way and made room for the unknown. I trudged through the hard work of letting go of some dreams I’d been holding on to since I was a kid.

I did this by believing what was always meant for me, as a living thing worthy as any other living thing is of being what it is, and NOT by thinking that I could trick the universe into giving me what I want.

I gave up control. I gave in to the idea that trying to control my life and happiness completely, excluded all the other possibilities of what a happy life meant. When a friend said to me, “you don’t have to be married to Frank, you can find someone who you really love — I finally understood. My ex-husband is good man, but we were not for each other and that is ok, too.

Letting go of the idea of the life I thought I’d have with him was impossibly hard… for about 3 days. Then my sister told me to make it my choice instead of a thing being done to me. Her advice resonated. My sorrow went from hopeless suffering to a new opportunity. There was no more having to beat a dead horse. It was a relief.

What hurt though, what terrified me, must have been as clear as day because in the first 24 hours of deciding to separate, while I sat on my parents sofa and wept, my dad said to me, “You’ll have children, sweetheart, don’t worry.” Not, “It will be all okay, this is for the best, you’ll find love again,” but the thing I was most afraid of that I wore like a neon orange jumpsuit, “What if I never have a family?”

I would not have a child with my ex. What this looked like, at 34 years old, was “What if there’s not enough time to meet my soulmate, fall in love, and have children all before my healthy childbearing years are up?” The feeling of urgency and desperation that line of reasoning evoked was overwhelming to the point that it choked me, so I embraced the choking fear, and like Chinese finger torture toy you win at the arcade, I figured out that when I just gave in, it released its grip.

Fine, I said, the worst case scenario is just as likely to happen as the best, so there is no reason to worry. What’s worrying going to create except desperation, which we all know a bad look. If anything might influence my future, it is openness; it is rejecting all shoulds, rejecting the idea that there is one way to be happy.

My aunt asked me, about a year after the separation, what I would do about trying to have children. Would I freeze my eggs? Would I look for a sperm donor and do it myself?

I’m not ruling these out, but right now the answer is no.

When I hear about companies paying for women to do this, it feels like the women are being forced out of the present moment and locked into a particular future (also it is fucked up because the other implicit argument in that is that women are not valuable workers unless they push back motherhood). I think I would rather experience not being able to have children than to marry myself to a static, frozen (forgive the pun) future.

This relates to the question I asked myself about how I went from unhappy to happy. Really, all I did was change myself from being pessimistic to optimistic. In Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit, she discusses how people see suffering differently. At the heart suffering is often a feeling of hopelessness, which depends on whether you see suffering as something permanent or something you can change. “Permanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem logical to give up. If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist…these explanations are temporary and specific; their fixability motivates you to start clearing them way as problems.”

One line really got to me, “Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages.” Since my divorce, I thought the main problem was differing views of marriage my ex and I held. I see marriage as infallible, that is, yes, you’ll have problems (maybe lots of them), but that is to be expected and you work on them until they’re fixed. My ex-husband’s view was, life is too short to be miserable. If problems don’t get fixed, you cut your losses and move on. Both are fair arguments, but they are diametrically opposed. We used to quarrel about this all the time. I’d say, “how can you believe our marriage will improve if you don’t really believe problems can be fixed?

I reasoned that my view of marriage was traditional, while he had a modern one—which is true—but it also speaks to our different approaches to suffering. I had a boyfriend say to me once that I’d stay in a bad relationship no matter what, that I didn’t think highly enough of myself to get out of it. That is only a little true. The other part is that I have, at least with love, an attitude toward optimism. I can see how this has both served me and not harmed me at times.

When the plan fell apart and I got divorced, I decided to change some of the perceived areas of lack to perceived abundance, and that engendered more optimism.

I started reminding myself of what I am grateful for starting with the basics, “the sound of my cat’s purring, my soft bed, my sister and brother, my parents, coffee, air-conditioning, etc.” 

A new friend recently said to me, as my cat sat beside him purring, “I like the sound they [cats] make.” These little things are everywhere and would compose an entire life if you let them.

Here is another practice of redefining the idea of scarcity or lacking, I listen to Nina Simone’s “Aint Got No, I got Life” over and over. I’ve been doing this for a few months. The song is part of my morning jams that get me stoked on the day.

She says, “Aint got no water, aint got no love”

Aint got no love is the refrain because it is the seemingly the most cruel lacking, “why am i alive any way,” she asks. Then the tune changes:

“I got my arms, I got my hands
I got my fingers, got my legs
I got my feet, I got my toes
I got my liver, got my blood
Got life, I got my life”

Also, I’d argue, she has love too because she has the love that she gives out and away!