Notes from Hell: Divorce Year

Editor’s Note

Some of us are journalers! Even during the toughest times in our lives, we journal on, whether it’s just to cope or to prove to ourselves that we are actually in fact experiencing what is happening right now. This series came directly from Laneia’s brain, much in the way Athena was born from Zeus’s head, and so while we hope to have further contributions to this series from Autostraddle team members down the line, it is Laneia who’s starting us off! The concept? We are presenting, without commentary, excerpts from our journals during one of the worst years we’ve experienced. (It can be any year! Just our personal worst!)

Thank you for bearing witness to some of our most vulnerable moments. You might wonder, dear reader, will these entries be sad? Will they be funny? The answer is yes.

They’ll also serve to show us that we lived right through it. Laneia is actually fine these days. She’s even writing again. 

an inky black couple of lines, much like might be dashed off by a pen

This has felt like a 3 year long nervous breakdown.

[Redacted] asked in the car had I not ever just felt that sexual connection with someone I didn’t know, where I just wanted to be with them immediately? and I said no. And added “except for you” to make it better, but it’s not true. I don’t want anyone to touch me ever again as long as I live.

Even though I know I’m gay, I sometimes think I’d be — not happier but just, it would be easier to keep mechanically and mindlessly reliving that trauma than to look at anything head-on over here, or try to be honest, or try to be happy.

I kind of feel like I gave this a good run, you know? The trying. I don’t know how much is left in me. I could just go back to nothing real. I could write my children letters and be gone forever.

The internet knows me better than [Redacted] does. Just! No real interest in me, actually me.
Wanted to reach for [Redacted] twice last night but stopped myself both times.

You’d think we just met. You’d think I was nobody.
It’s just baffling.

This isn’t going to work is it

Genuinely fearing for my life tonight. [Redacted] is unhinged. And no, asshole, that is not what gaslighting means! A literal dictionary living in your fucking back pocket filled with all the new words you just heard yesterday that you could LOOK UP AND USE CORRECTLY before you scream them at me while you throw boxes across the dining room.

Not great Bob
I don’t think I’ve eaten real food in a month.

It is utterly ridiculous and humiliating how many times I’ve checked my phone over the last hour and a half.

What to Do When Your [Redacted] Leaves You

  • Chill four (4) beers
  • Watch one (1) episode of Derry Girls, then all of them.
  • Consume beer one by one for hours.
  • Buy Booksmart
  • Order sushi
  • Watch Booksmart twice in a row
  • Text your [redacted] throughout
  • Block your [redacted]’s number
  • Read twitter
  • Smoke
  • Sleep for four (4) hours
  • Let dogs out, then back in
  • Text your [redacted] once
  • Unblock your [redacted]’s number, block it again
  • Open blinds
  • Shower

This is so fucking inconvenient!
Jesus

So bottom line is that I thought we had one kind of love and we didn’t. So like, I just forgive that time and let it go and keep my own self. I’ve known me longer anyway. Easy!

For shopping and thinks:

  1. Did I project an idea onto [redacted] for eight years? Can a person sustain such a lie to herself for that long? (Yes and you have so much proof of this you absolute dumbass)
  2. Was it ever as good as I told myself it was?
  3. How to trust again ?? (Maybe a solution: scoop brain into ice cream dishes and walk into traffic)
  4. Books for reclaiming a body.
  5. Anything for reminding myself that I’m safe.
  6. Unlearn the physical stress response in my jaw, shoulders, lungs, tin can head.

I don’t even know how to process this kind of sadness and grief and fury. Do I just make up my own way? A way that’s kind to me. I could do that, I think. I could forgive myself.

I have taken off my ring tonight.

I’m so incredibly sad today. [Redacted]’s days off are just impossible to get through without collapsing in on myself. I’m trying to keep it together because I still have to get Eli packed for Seattle. I feel like I’m holding my breath, all day. The truth is that I want the best for [Redacted], and I’m devastated that that’s not me anymore.
Shhh shhh shhhhhh get up get up. Go do something. I love you you’re ok.

I took the boys to the airport before sunrise and just everything about it was so lonely and empty and my sadness stretched out for what felt like the rest of my life. Like being little in the backseat at night, going down a dark highway and trying to take in how big and unknown everything is on the other side of the window, but also not really wanting to because it’s terrifying — you know you’ll never turn down that road, or that one, not ever and you’ll never know those places, and it’s so scary to think of it all being out there all the time but it’s ok because you don’t have to deal with it, you’re safe — and then realizing that actually no one’s in the car with you. Like the only things I still knew were the stars in the sky. And even those disappeared with the sun eventually.

Today was impossible.

Do not prove her right. Don’t prove anyone right about you.

I’m trying to find the optimism and calm that I had yesterday but it’s like I was a different person.

Eating an apple damn sandwich while I stare at my green pool and oh my fucking god is this really my life right now.

Fucking jesus okay.

  1. Feeling so sad that I could scream until my throat bled and if I cry into the cement floor one more time this week so help me god
  2. Should I take a day off?!? How do I work?!?
  3. THE WORD SAD IS TOO SMALL TO BE THIS FUCKING BIG FUCK

I’ve always been terrified that finding this kind of space and time would kill me once I got it — that I’d regret so much once I finally had the freedom. Now that I have it, and it’s so dark, I wonder if it really is bad and sad or if it’s everything I’ve ever needed. Just, am I scared and upset because this is wrong, or because it’s right and I don’t have a map?

Got out of the house yesterday.
I didn’t cry.

I’m realizing that I don’t know how to be?? A person? I don’t understand where the balance is between being needy and being shut down. I would rather check out of humanity altogether than keep trying to figure this shit out. NOT DIE just not be in this miasma of personhood and words and money anymore! And I think I have to stop being around people because I keep fucking this up and then they’re disappointed and confused and they would’ve been better off without ever meeting me. But like, less dramatic.

I didn’t cry today either.

I have all these voice memos now. It’s impossible to lie to myself out loud and I just keep talking, for hours.

It’s so hard for me to keep any forward, healing momentum. I’m at least able to find it every few days, but it’s so frustrating to lose it over and over again.

Ok I’m serious!
I have to drag myself out!
of this! ditch!

To Do:

  1. Move the body around
  2. Remove all visual signs that [redacted] was ever even within earshot of knowing my Starbucks order much less fucking living with me.
  3. Interact with all areas of the house. Sit in a closet! Walk around on the ceiling with a glass of ice water and never trip. What if you moved a chair somewhere else.
  4. Remember [redacted] was not a good enough [redacted] and had shown no real desire to change that. For years, you sweet stupid baby.
  5. Remember that this is a freedom.

They love me and they keep telling me it won’t always feel like this and INTELLECTUALLY I know they’re right but the fact that I’m already out of tissues again and can only keep down plain rice BEGS TO DIFFER.

Maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing right now, and probably that’s fine. I guess I don’t need to know what I’m doing? Like maybe/probably I’ll fuck some of this up, but maybe that’s fine because maybe everything’s just always fine as long as I’m alive and being nice to myself.

A safe space to say that I feel so stupid and ugly and old and I put up V’s Lex ad and I cannot believe ! that this ! is!! my life !!! Meeting a total fucking stranger from Ohio at her actual hotel room which is in fact at a resort and then there will be drinks and sex I guess? Do I even know how to have sex with someone else? with the lights on? This is both pathetic of me and above my station. Like who do I think I am but also I am definitely not this, am I? Am I.

Ok I do know how to have sex with someone else with the lights on.

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Laneia

Laneia has written 311 articles for us.

37 Comments

  1. Laneia! I love you! (also I am never this brilliantly articulate and funny when in the depths of my own despair; this is / you are amazing and I am in awe that you shared this with us.)

  2. Laneia, thank you so much for sharing this. Like Hana, I’m so impressed by your notes, your journal entries, your observations and your humor!

  3. ok im obsessed with all of this but especially “THE WORD SAD IS TOO SMALL TO BE THIS FUCKING BIG FUCK” which is rreeeeeeal!!!!!! thank you for sharing these entries Laneia 💗

  7. Straight up crying at work! This broke my heart in such a tremendous way, I can’t imagine. Thank you for sharing this with us

  8. “Fucking jesus okay” and then itemizing the situation is such a familiar response to Shit Happening and just <3.

  10. Laneeeiiaaaaa what the FUCK this is so gorgeous, your wit and light shining through the whole time UGH. Anyway loved this, and the highway metaphor: Interact with all areas of the house. Sit in a closet! Walk around on the ceiling with a glass of ice water and never trip. What if you moved a chair somewhere else.

  15. ahh thank you all 🥲 i was going to reply to every comment here but then i didn’t want to artificially inflate my comment tally, and THAT is exactly the kind of overthinking and second-guessing that’ll get you divorced okay !! ha ha ha we have fun.

    • so good i screenshotted an excerpt and shared it with the gay grief group chat. thank you for sharing. <3

  17. I realized I was holding my breath while reading this for quite some time, because it all came out in a whoooosh at that last sentence. So much <3 for you, Laneia.

  19. Not only is this so aching, beautiful, vulnerable, but there’s also just like— really good advice and ideas for coping in here Laneia (!!) “Interact with all areas of the house” “Books for reclaiming a body” 🤍

  20. “I’ve known me longer anyway” is everything. Also, I’m a huge fan of the voice-memo-as-diary and if anyone ever found my phone or played one aloud, I’d evaporate.

    • On June 15, 2021 I was in couples counseling with my wife. She read me a letter saying she wanted a divorce.

      What a year it’s been. It’s impossible to describe but it helps to know there are other people who have gone through it too.

      What seems impossible is possible.

  21. The line that got me was “This is so fucking inconvenient!” YES. Like it’s not enough just to have to go through the relationship loss and all the trauma and grief and insecurity and loneliness that goes with that, but also the loss of everything else you could have been doing with your life if the person hadn’t RUINED YOUR FEELINGS, goddamnit!

  22. Okay I’m sitting here rather stunned. This was so very evocative. So much of my own journey through divorce reared up to say See, you made it, but at the same time See, we haven’t gone away.

    Oof.

    • Thank you for this. I had the exact same response as Deli. Just wanted to say how much I recognised that tsunami. I thought I would die from it. Not that I wanted to. I just could not process what seemed to keep coming. Now, fifteen years on I see that it was waves. First the big one that obliterated everything. Then the secondary ones that kept punding through the fragile scaffold I’d started to assemble. But then they got successfully smaller, my foundations got stronger. Now they still come, but so small, and only when I choose to meet them. Like the having my toes chilled at the edge of the surf on a winter holiday by the beach – now I feel when I want to remember. But it’s my choice and then I put my warm socks back on and head inland. Time really does heal. You are so much closer to you now.

  23. Thank you so much for sharing this!

    The “not great Bob” made me laugh so much and reminds me of some of my own journaling XD

  25. Laneia, I read this yesterday and I was so overwhelmed with emotion I didn’t know what to say. I re-read it today, and I still don’t know what to say, other than to say Thank You. Which still doesn’t feel like enough. But it’s what I have. Thank you for this. Thank you.

  26. GOSH this is gorgeous Laneia, so beautiful and heartbreaking and I am 100000% stealing “This is both pathetic of me and above my station. “

  27. As other commenters have said, I am so impressed at how you are able to put into words this awareness of what you’re feeling, and also have the space to reflect on it (and be funny about it). So many perceptive, painful gems of recognition in here. Thank you for sharing this with us. (You may even have inspired me to start journaling again)

  28. Please let me know when you broke into my house and stole parts of my journal.

    Also, please let me know how you get to the part where you’re actually okay. I haven’t figured that part out yet. Or just break back into my house and leave that part of the journal here. That would be fine too. Okay, thanks.

  29. Your ability and willingness to be so vulnerable in your writing is astonishing to me. You are astonishing.

  31. Wow wow wow yes thank you for sharing. I had to read this in pieces because I just wanted to sit with it.

    Also this particular quote
    “am I scared and upset because this is wrong, or because it’s right and I don’t have a map?”
    will haunt me for a long time.

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