Karen, thank you for this beautiful, vulnerable, powerful reflection. So many of us are in touch with sorrow and my hope is we can meet each other here and grow in compassion. I’m so grateful you’re here and that this writing practice has been supportive! ❤️
I experienced my deepest suffering in the wake of my divorce. It wasn’t just the end of my marriage, it was the end of a particular kind of life I had been building towards for about “ten-to-my-entire-existence-years.” So, not only did I find myself without a husband and co-parent for our daughter, I found myself without a home, without a job, without a role as a wife, a worker, a functioning human being in this society that tells us we are what we do (professionally and expectedly). It felt like being violently ripped out of the womb and forced into something I did not ask for and could never have imagined. Here is who saved me:
1. My mother. Who fed me when I couldn’t feed myself, just like when I was a baby.
2. My father. Who kept a roof over my head and told me without words that I belonged under it, just like when I was a baby.
3. My daughter. Because she made me laugh and hope. And because motherhood was the one role left me, and I leaned into it with whatever I had.
4. My sisters, raised with and chosen. Who, when my back was breaking under the psychic and emotional load, silently slipped their arms around my waist and lent their shoulders and their time to the lifting of the burden.
5. This writing group. That helped me find my voice, but it wasn’t the old voice, it was a new voice, growing stronger and more curious and comfortable each time it shared or something was shared with it. A voice reaching, tentatively at first, toward new worlds of possibility and new ways of being.
And now I know, I am what I do, but, repeatedly (in the style of Aristotle). In the manner I show up, in the content of my character and the living of my values - and no change in practical circumstances can rob me of it.
Karen, thank you for this beautiful, vulnerable, powerful reflection. So many of us are in touch with sorrow and my hope is we can meet each other here and grow in compassion. I’m so grateful you’re here and that this writing practice has been supportive! ❤️
I experienced my deepest suffering in the wake of my divorce. It wasn’t just the end of my marriage, it was the end of a particular kind of life I had been building towards for about “ten-to-my-entire-existence-years.” So, not only did I find myself without a husband and co-parent for our daughter, I found myself without a home, without a job, without a role as a wife, a worker, a functioning human being in this society that tells us we are what we do (professionally and expectedly). It felt like being violently ripped out of the womb and forced into something I did not ask for and could never have imagined. Here is who saved me:
1. My mother. Who fed me when I couldn’t feed myself, just like when I was a baby.
2. My father. Who kept a roof over my head and told me without words that I belonged under it, just like when I was a baby.
3. My daughter. Because she made me laugh and hope. And because motherhood was the one role left me, and I leaned into it with whatever I had.
4. My sisters, raised with and chosen. Who, when my back was breaking under the psychic and emotional load, silently slipped their arms around my waist and lent their shoulders and their time to the lifting of the burden.
5. This writing group. That helped me find my voice, but it wasn’t the old voice, it was a new voice, growing stronger and more curious and comfortable each time it shared or something was shared with it. A voice reaching, tentatively at first, toward new worlds of possibility and new ways of being.
And now I know, I am what I do, but, repeatedly (in the style of Aristotle). In the manner I show up, in the content of my character and the living of my values - and no change in practical circumstances can rob me of it.