Choosing Divorce

"It is easier to discount and challenge the perception of the mind than it is to quiet the longing of the heart." When my heart first began its soft whispers indicating that it was time for my marriage to be over, my logical mind couldn't trust the voice. It didn't even want to listen to the voice. What it was asking of me felt impossible and shameful. How could I even think of walking away from my marriage? The thought of ending my marriage brought with it tidal waves of shame and guilt, the intensity of which washed away the possibility long before I could make sense of the feelings. I felt selfish for even entertaining the idea. Wasn’t it my responsibility to care for my husband and my children and to put their needs ahead of mine? Who was I to only think of myself and my desires? I remembered my feelings of hurt when I found out my dad cheated on my mom and then years later when he finally chose to leave the marriage. I hated him for making that decision, for hurting my mother and breaking up our family. I couldn't bear the thought of my children looking at me through those same eyes of disappointment and pain. I would rather choose to feel disappointed in my marriage than believe that I had caused my loved ones to experience disappointment. It felt easier to protect them from their pain instead of feeling mine. For years, I decided that my only choice was to stay in my marriage. To try my best to be happy. I assumed that my unhappiness meant that there was just something wrong with me and that my unhappiness was my problem. For years, I continued dealing with it the only way I knew how - silently and alone. I thought if I never talked about it, it wasn't real. And if I never expressed my disappointment, it didn't exist either. If I could hide what I felt from everyone else, I didn't have to do anything about the feelings. I could go on pretending that they didn't matter. In fact, I decided that my feelings didn't matter. I decided that loneliness was okay because I didn't know anything different. Worst of all, I decided that I had no other choice. This was the life I had signed up for. I made my bed, and now I must lie in it. But no matter how many times I tried to decide just to be here now and make the best of it - my sadness never went away. I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing from my life. I searched everywhere for the missing part of me. Throughout my marriage, I repeatedly dove into things, attempting to soften the discomfort I felt internally. I distracted myself with my studies, workouts, job, and children. When my body started to falter, I dove into healing it with everything I had. I found it easier to believe that I could fix my body than to figure out why I felt so lonely all the time. Although there were moments of great happiness in my life, nothing I tried ever connected me to my inner sense of joy. It was like a needle in a haystack that I simply could not find. I started to question its very existence. Was it even possible to feel the kind of happiness I was seeking? I fervently believed I should be happy by all accounts, facts, logic, and considerations. My life was good. I didn't have everything I wanted, but I certainly had enough to be grateful for. For years, I lived in the space between actually BEING happy and feeling like I SHOULD be happy and BEING grateful and feeling like I SHOULD be grateful. But the undeniable truth, or the truth that became harder and harder for me to deny, is that I didn't feel all that happy all that often. A significant source of this unhappiness was my marriage and, more specifically, who I had become in my marriage. Only on my meditation cushion did peace gradually allow its presence to be known to me. Like a subtle whisper rising up from the essence of my being, "Here," it whispered, "I'm right here; I've been here all along." I clung to its embrace. Those moments of peace were my lifeline. It was like coming up for a gasp of air when you were drowning in a vast ocean. It became my medicine. It was the only feeling that I knew I could trust. Everything else felt like a delusion. This place of peace is the place where the answers would come. I intuitively understood that I didn't have to look for peace anymore because it had found me. It had existed within me all along. I sat on my cushion and waited for inner peace to erase the guilt, frustration, anger, and resentment from my life and herald in the contentment I wanted to feel in my marriage. Nothing came. Nothing changed.