AFTER / ALONE

Letter 027 NEW

I Thought Leaving Was Supposed to Feel Better.

At the beginning of this year, I was unhappily married.

Now I'm unhappily alone.

There.

That's the sentence nobody puts on the other side of the inspirational quote about choosing yourself.

I left.

I changed my life.

I survived the part I thought would be the hardest.

And somehow I still ended up here, looking around at a life that is technically more mine than it has been in years and wondering why I don't feel happier inside it.

I thought leaving would feel like relief.

And sometimes it does.

But relief is not the same thing as happiness.

Nobody tells you that enough.

Sometimes freedom is incredibly quiet.

Sometimes peace feels suspiciously similar to loneliness when you've spent years accustomed to chaos.

Sometimes you finally get the empty room you begged for—

and then you have to sit in it.

I don't want my marriage back.

That's what makes this complicated.

I'm not confusing loneliness with regret.

I can know leaving was necessary and still hate eating dinner alone.

I can know I deserve something different and still wish there were somebody beside me.

I can be proud of myself for getting here and still admit:

I don't particularly like being here right now.

Maybe that's the part of healing I wasn't prepared for.

I thought there would be a before and an after.

Unhappy.

Leave.

Happy.

Instead there was another word in the middle.

Alone.

And apparently I have to learn how to live there too.

At the beginning of this year, I was unhappily married.

Now I'm unhappily alone.

But those aren't the same unhappiness.

One required me to leave.

The other is asking me to build.