PSA for all the Nosey Nelly’s and Gossip Gary’s out there spreading rumors:
- If you’re gonna make shit up about situations you know nothing about at least make it entertaining for when I hear about it.
- & even more so & not so kindly – leave other people the hell out of it. Don’t drag people into situations they have nothing to do with. If you want to talk shit, give someone the title of villain, make someone the bad guy: 🙋🏼♀️ I’m right here. Innocent bystanders should not be damaged because of your recklessness.
And now back to our regular scheduled program. . .
Apparently, living in a small town with nothing more than churches and bars is simply too boring for some these days. . . so while I don’t feel I owe anyone an explanation for a single thing I do with MY life I have always been open, honest, real, raw and willing to speak MY truth & right now this is my truth. . .
***drum roll,please***
Divorce.
***dun dun dun***
I’ll pause and let you gather yourselves. .
Oh wait. .
Ya’ll have been whispering in the shadows about it for months but rumors certainly aren’t always the truth so let me clear a few things up for you. (& just so we’re clear I asked my now ex husband if he was okay with me writing this – he was.)
Yes, I am now divorced.
No, I didn’t leave him for a woman, man, sex, drugs or rock & roll.
No, he didn’t leave me because of hate, anger, or betrayal.
No, there wasn’t some massive blowout, dramatic betrayal, or episode of Dateline that ended our marriage.
Sorry to disappoint. Truly.
I know some of you were hoping for better material. 💀
The truth is much less scandalous—and a hell of a lot more of what I wish people would grow up & do before it gets to a place of hate.
We were together for 14 years. And somewhere over those fourteen years, we grew.
We changed.
We became different versions of ourselves.
We found different hobbies, wanted different things in this beautiful, ever changing world.
We simply grew in different directions, that no longer aligned.
And eventually, we had enough love and respect for each other to confront something incredibly painful:
We could no longer be the people the other person wanted, needed, or deserved.
We acknowledged the facts and truly felt neither of us should have to shrink ourselves, abandon who we’ve become, or squeeze ourselves back into a mold that fit two people fourteen years ago.
So we chose to end our marriage before love had the chance to become hate.
Call it sad. Because it is.
Call it heartbreaking. Because sometimes it absolutely is.
But don’t call it failure.
Sometimes loving someone means fighting like hell to stay.
& sometimes loving someone means having the courage to admit that staying would eventually destroy the very love you should protect.
Two things can be true at the same time.
We ultimately chose the latter, together. Not on a whim. Not out of rage or anger. Not because we didn’t fight like hell to make it work.
But because we still love each other enough to want the absolute best for one another.
Staying together wasn’t what was best for us.
So please, continue with the rumors if reality just isn’t spicy enough for you.
“I left him for someone else.
One of us cheated.
I lost all this weight & now wanted to be single.
I’m secretly living a double life and doing drugs.”
Personally, I’d prefer we start telling people I ran away with the circus. 🎪🎟️🎠 At least give me a trapeze, some sequins, and a scandal worthy of the amount of energy being invested in my personal life.
I’ve heard so many versions of what’s happening in MY life it’s honestly hard to keep up. 😂
But since we’re talking about divorce, let’s talk about the part that actually matters.
I recently listened to divorce attorney James Sexton talk with Mel Robbins about marriage, divorce, love, grief and this strange societal belief that if a marriage ends, it must mean the marriage failed.
And that hit me.
Because somewhere along the way we decided that the only successful marriage is one that lasts until somebody dies.
No matter what happens between the wedding and the funeral.
You can become strangers.
You can resent each other.
You can stop laughing.
Stop touching.
Stop dreaming together.
Stop recognizing yourself.
You can spend decades sleeping beside someone while feeling completely alone.
But hey—you stayed married = Success!
Meanwhile, two people can look at each other with love, acknowledge that they have grown in different directions, wish each other happiness, divide fourteen years of a life they built together, walk away with their hearts absolutely shattered—and somehow that is failure?
I call bullshit.
Maybe failure isn’t divorce.
- Maybe failure would have been staying simply so we could tell everyone else we stayed.
- Maybe failure would have been slowly becoming two bitter people who resented each other for all the pieces of ourselves we had to sacrifice just to keep up with the archaic tradition of ‘til death due us part.’
- Maybe failure would have been taking fourteen beautiful, complicated, imperfect years and letting them rot until all we could remember was how badly they ended.
I refuse to do that to our story.
Because our marriage mattered.
It mattered even though it ended.
The love was real even though it changed.
The memories don’t disappear because a judge signed a piece of paper.
Fourteen years don’t suddenly become meaningless because there won’t be a fifteenth.
There were birthdays and holidays and inside jokes. Homes and adventures. Losses we survived. Victories we celebrated. Versions of ourselves we only became because the other person was there.
There was love.
Real & sometimes very raw love.
And I think one of the most damaging things we do is convince ourselves that something must last forever in order for it to have been successful.
Some things aren’t meant to last forever.
That doesn’t make them mistakes.
Sometimes they did exactly what they were supposed to do during that particular page or chapter or book in your life story.
And sometimes the most loving thing you can do is recognize when that book in the series has ended before you destroy everything beautiful that happened while you were writing it.
Because what exactly are we teaching the generations behind us when we glorify staying at all costs?
That longevity matters more than happiness?
That staying together while quietly hating each other is somehow more honorable than separating while you can still love each other?
That losing yourself is the price you’re supposed to pay for commitment?
That growth is acceptable only as long as it doesn’t make anyone around you uncomfortable?
That once you promise forever, you’re supposed to remain the exact same person you were the day you made that promise?
Hell. No.
I don’t want that lesson attached to my life.
I want the people watching me—my nieces, my friends, my employees, my villagers, whoever happens to cross my path—to see something different.
I want them to know you are allowed to grow.
You are allowed to change.
You are allowed to heal.
You are allowed to discover things about yourself at 37 that you couldn’t possibly have known at 23.
You are allowed to decide that something you once wanted desperately isn’t what you want anymore.
You are allowed to love someone deeply and still understand that loving them doesn’t automatically mean you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life married to them.
& you are absolutely allowed to stop abandoning yourself just to make everyone else comfortable.
& No, that doesn’t mean you run the second something gets hard.
Come on, fourteen years should prove I’m not exactly afraid of commitment. 🙄
Relationships require work.
Love requires work.
Growth requires work.
Sometimes staying requires tremendous courage.
But so does ending it.
And sometimes going in different directions isn’t giving up.
Sometimes it’s finally being brave enough to stop pretending.
James Sexton said something else that stuck with me: “Sometimes happily ever after means happily ever after separately.”
That doesn’t mean there isn’t grief.
There is.
God, there is.
There are moments when I miss pieces of the life I had so deeply that it physically hurts. There are memories that still make me laugh and others that knock the wind straight out of me. There are things I will probably grieve for a very long time.
But grief isn’t proof that I made the wrong decision.
It’s proof that what I had was worth grieving.
It’s proof that fourteen years mattered.
And I’m not going to rewrite our history into something ugly just because the ending hurts.
I don’t need him to become the villain so I can become the hero.
I don’t need to hate him to justify why it no longer worked.
I don’t need betrayal to earn permission to begin again.
And maybe that’s the part people struggle with.
There isn’t always a bad guy.
Sometimes there are just two good people who can no longer be good for each other in the ways they both deserve.
So yes, I chose myself.
But I also chose him.
And he also chose himself.
& also chose me.
I chose not to ask him to spend the rest of his life trying to be inlove with a version of me that no longer exists.
And he chose to keep doing the things he enjoys and not ask me to drain myself doing things I don’t to fit into his dreams.
I’ve worked too fucking hard to become this woman to squeeze myself into a mold that wasn’t for me, anymore.
I’m messy.
I’m healing.
I’m loud.
I’m complicated.
I’m still figuring shit out.
I have boundaries now—which apparently is a shocking plot twist for several people. 😂
I want different things.
I dream bigger.
I rest. (Okay, okay – sparingly or when my body forces me.)
I change my mind.
I take up space.
I love fiercely.
And for the first time in my life I’m healing. And I’m learning that I don’t have to earn the right or explain away pieces of myself to exist exactly as I am.
I’m not shrinking again.
Not for a marriage.
Not for family.
Not for friendship.
Not for a job.
Not for anyone.
And I won’t ask someone I love to shrink themselves for me either.
Maybe that’s what love looks like sometimes.
Not possession.
Not obligation.
Not but we promised.
Just two people standing in the wreckage of something they once thought would last forever and still caring enough about each other to say:
I don’t want either of us to disappear just so this marriage can survive.
If that makes my divorce a failure in someone else’s eyes, I’m okay with that. Honestly, their opinion doesn’t matter unless they were in the marriage with us but last time I checked we weren’t practicing polygamy. 🤷♀️
I’m learning that I don’t need everyone to understand the choices I make for my life.
I just need to be able to look at myself in the mirror and know I made them from the right place.
And if I leave any kind of mark on this world, I hope that’s what it is.
Growth.
Love.
Healing.
Grace.
Compassion.
The courage to do hard things without becoming hard.
I want to be remembered as someone who loved people fiercely without requiring them to remain the same.
Someone who let people grow.
Someone who grew herself.
Someone who understood that sometimes loving another person means holding on—and sometimes it means opening your hands.
Someone who could walk through heartbreak without turning love into hate just to make leaving easier.
Someone who chose healing over resentment.
Someone who chose authenticity over appearances.
Someone who chose becoming over staying comfortable.
And someone who refused to stay stagnant just because her growth made others uncomfortable.
So no.
I don’t consider my marriage a failure.
I consider it fourteen years of my life.
Fourteen years of love, lessons, laughter, heartbreak, memories, mistakes, growth and becoming.
It was a chapter I genuinely believed would last forever the entire book series.
It didn’t.
And I can grieve that while still being excited as hell to turn the page.
Because two things can be true:
I can love the life I had and still choose the life waiting for me.
I can be devastated that something ended and deeply grateful that we had enough love left to end it before we destroyed it.
And I can walk away from a marriage without walking away from everything beautiful it gave me.
Maybe that isn’t failure.
Maybe that’s growth.
Maybe that’s grace.
Maybe that’s love.
Maybe that’s healing
And if that isn’t dramatic enough for the rumor mill…
Fine.
Since I have a masters degree is dealing with clowns let just go with the storyline that I joined the damn circus. 🎪
