The Final Stage.

I’ve been doing a lot of introspection the last couple of weeks. Candidly, I’ve been doing a lot of introspection the last couple of years.

The me before my divorce and the me after are two completely different versions of me. Both versions are good people. But the me now is a lot less judgmental, a lot more open-minded, a lot kinder, empathetic and this version has developed a lot of “soft skills”.  

As many of you know – or should know by now – I’m an energy person. I’m still sarcastic – one of my best friends rips on me (“Oh my god, You’re SO zen!”) but I wouldn’t have it any other way – at the core I’m still the same person – just more evolved, I guess – (and thankfully, still with a sense of humor who can make fun of myself as much as my friend – which is not an easy task).

I put myself out there quite a bit and some people scratch their heads and wonder “why do you do that?” And I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Why the hell do I do this? 

I saw a quote the other day that said “the final stage of healing is using what happens to you to help other people.”

When you have hit a rock bottom – and everyone’s “rock bottom” is different – it is the loneliest feeling in the world. There are so many ugly and sad emotions surrounding you, that most days you feel like you’re going to feel like that forever. For me, I refused to feel like that forever and every day was a battle. But, like I had a gun to my head, I made the decision to try to take action to feel even a little better than the day before. And eventually – maybe days, weeks, months, years later – you wake up and you realize – you’re through it. It obviously doesn’t happen instantly and it is a progression – most days it’s two steps forward, one step back – as are most things in life.  When you realize you’re finally through the fog, there is a feeling of relief and freedom that is hard to describe. 

 As a healing mechanism, I started writing more publicly about my journey – obviously, not every detail, because those aren’t necessary. In actuality, I had only planned on writing a post describing my divorce, the first year following it and the bizarre sociological experiment that it became. And what happened upon that one post blew my mind. Absolute strangers reached out with their stories and told me how much sharing mine helped them. I decided to continue to write and two years later, people still reach out to me out of the blue.

Two nights ago I received a message from an acquaintance of mine who I hadn’t spoken to in years. This person is not very active on social media- to my knowledge, anyway – but regardless, they sent me a message sayiing they were going through a divorce and had read some of my blog and how much it resonated with them. We spoke on the phone for an hour last night and so much of what they were going through I had been through at one point. When I was going through mine, there weren’t any people I could go to that had been where I was. For me, I never want people to feel like that. And not even just with divorce – with any element of shame or judgment.

Recently, I made an interesting discovery about myself. When I told friends early on my shameful stuff, I told them so they could hate me as much as I hated myself at the time and to let them know I wasn’t this amazing person they thought I was. What happened instead was truly remarkable and is the reason why I will never give up on humanity. Instead of hating me, they shared with me their shame and loved me even harder – which was a tremendous part of my healing – and for them, probably theirs too. That has never left me and I’ve continued to share my story because helping others feels really fucking awesome, and as the quote states, is my final stage of healing.