summer vacation

Lately all of the pieces of my life have fallen into the exact place I need them to be in. I practically watched the pieces fall into their assigned places in my brain space, and it was like watching a movie that you know will change your life once the credits start to roll.

The summer is my time to reorient myself from the final stages of separation and entering the first stages of what it is like to be officially divorced. Personally it feels like it will be so much more than no longer being married on paper. When my ex and I got married, we took our vows seriously and they were mentioned often in our arguments. Even though we separated, I still wanted to offer him a certain level of respect that should have been something mutual we both agreed to adhere to.

My divorce was a really rough battle uphill, at times it seemed like I was always being set back so far in the process. Now that things in my personal life have calmed down, the divorce process in almost over, and im caught in between remembering how far away this exact moment in my life felt, and trying to figure out if im mainly happy with the decisions that have led me here.

I have always participated in life on the sidelines, I took the time I needed to prepare myself before going outside of my comfort zone. when I got married, I was going far outside of the many possibilities I had imagined for myself. Everything was new and exhilarating but there was a small part of me that knew part of the decisions I had made were wrong in the sense that I hadn’t been the same person I was my entire life. Being married was like being a caricature of myself, I felt like my body and personality were very rough outlines of who I was before, and the angles I worked so hard to round out my entire life were sharper than they ever had been, there was never any time to smooth out the imperfections, the way I was so used to doing.

Ive often mentioned that being married was mainly feeling like a fake of myself, and it was suffocating, I remember too many times to count, sat on my couch frozen, scared to breathe wrong and start another argument about something that we both knew didn’t really matter. When I started my blog and writing again, it was becoming harder and harder to keep lying to myself and it slowly became clear that I couldn’t make the marriage work anymore, I was tired of being the only one held accountable and not getting any progress in return. i was tired of not agreeing with my partner about issues that seemed simple before I had gotten married, and I was tired of feeling like I couldn’t be myself anymore. I had to do something drastic to break myself out of the hold the marriage had over me, and it was the last extreme thing I felt I had to do but wasn’t fully comfortable with doing.

My hometown is once again my comfort zone and feels more and more like home again with each passing day. Even though I have always been a homebody, I cannot count how many times I look at a place and am thankful I don’t have any bad associations and memories to that place. Its like being let out of a cage for the first time, thankful you can see something and it not make you feel absolutely horrible.

My separation and move back to my hometown came at the same time as my scholarship deadline and I was forced to defer my enrollment for a semester. Now I am about to begin my final year of undergrad and am slowly beginning my ascent to earning a PhD.

The biggest fork in the road that I am slowly beginning to delve deeper into is dating. I always knew I had high standards, but the dating pool and scene is just so foreign compared to my childhood imaginary scenarios of what being a twenty something year old single woman would do in regards to dating. My marriage was my first “real” relationship, it is how I learned what kind of person I am in relationships, and I’m forced to uphold the standards I once held as a fresh eighteen year old. I don’t really find it hard to date with a child, I’m blessed enough to have the ability to keep my dating life private from the general public, including my family. My ex was also the first man I brought home, so you can almost certainly assume in terms of dating, I have no idea what I am doing, and with the growing use and presence of social media, and dating apps, I find it more important to find someone who I can have conversations about things that are more substantial than Hollywood drama and gossip, the main thing I miss about being married was that there was always someone as willing to talk and listen to me as I was to listen to them talk.

The transition to being officially divorced is something ive been looking forward to for a long time. Even now that things are seemingly back to normal, I feel relieved that I am no longer a part of something that takes away from my individuality. I placed a lot of holds on things I wanted to pursue in order to focus on the dissolution of my marriage, and now that it is almost dissolved, I can finally embark on a number of new adventures.