I Was Worth Every Breakup

Women who have spent decades being responsible, capable, accommodating, and extraordinarily good at making things work.

Women who are beginning to wonder whether the lives they've worked so hard to build are still the lives they want.

But this week, I'm writing for me.

Because I'm grieving the end of a relationship I genuinely believed would be my last.

I'm grieving the future I thought we were building. The plans we made. The things I believed were possible. The version of my life I could see so clearly that I stopped imagining alternatives.

I thought I'd found my future. I thought I knew what it looked like. And without quite realizing it, I stopped wondering what else might be possible.

Now, for the first time in a long time, I have a future I can't picture yet.

And I'm smiling as I dream new dreams.

I'm also grieving. Relieved. Excited. And occasionally overwhelmed by the sheer number of decisions that suddenly belong entirely to me.

Which brings me to the leopard wallpaper.

The first night I was home alone, my son was out visiting friends, and it was just me and the dogs.

I hung my first strip of leopard-print wallpaper.

And cried.

Happy tears.

Because it was so gloriously ridiculous, and I fucking loved it.

But what surprised me was how proud I felt.

I've accomplished plenty of things in my 55 years. I've built a career, raised a son, written books, started businesses, and navigated more than a few spectacularly difficult chapters.

Yet I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt that particular kind of pride.

I stood there looking at my ridiculous wall, thinking about what it had taken to get to that moment.

I'd let go of a relationship that wasn't awful.

There was no villain.

No dramatic betrayal.

No spectacular event that made the decision obvious.

There was a man I loved and a future I had believed in.

And the growing realization that the life we were building wasn't the life I wanted anymore.

That's a hard thing to admit when you've invested your heart in a future.

It's an even harder thing to act on.

But I did.

And there I was, standing in my living room, so fucking proud of myself that I cried.

Since then, I've been on a revamp rampage.

Deep cleaning. Building furniture. Purging things I no longer want. Buying a record player. Hanging Dolly Parton art.

I even put feather eyelashes on a five-and-a-half-foot flamingo lamp I snatched off Facebook Marketplace.

In three weeks, I've completely transformed the landscape and energy of my home.

It's peaceful. It's colorful. It's ridiculous.

It's mine.

What surprised me most was how quickly I started making decisions without mentally consulting anyone else.

Not because John had ever asked me to put his preferences first. He hadn't.

But somewhere along the way, I'd slipped back into an old habit of anticipating what someone else might want before considering what I wanted.

And I'm extraordinarily good at it. I've spent decades honing that skill, and it's served me well in all kinds of ways.

Sometimes it's also a spectacular way to forget to ask myself what I want.

This was my first time living with a romantic partner since my divorce. After years of doing the work, I thought I'd healed those old patterns.

But muscle memory is a bitch.

My auto-shrinker was alive and well.

And it wasn't because I don't love the heck out of myself. I can love myself deeply and still slip into the habit of putting everyone else's needs first. Being considerate of the people we love doesn't automatically mean we're considering ourselves.

I don't want to stop being thoughtful or generous or attentive. I just want to remember that I'm one of the people I love, too.

I've been thinking about the men I've loved over nearly four decades.

Some were perfectly wonderful human beings. Heck, I even married a couple of 'em. And I don't regret loving them.

At different points in my life, I genuinely believed I'd found my forever person.

I loved those futures.

I believed in them.

I made choices and commitments based on what I knew, what I wanted, and who I was at the time.

But why do we have such a difficult time accepting that something can have been right for us once without being right for us forever?

We stay in careers because we worked so hard to get there.

We maintain friendships because we've known each other forever.

We keep honoring commitments made by women we barely recognize anymore.

Because wanting something different doesn't seem like sufficient grounds for changing our lives.

We need to prove that something was wrong.

Wrong enough.

Unbearable enough.

And I wonder how many women have spent years waiting for something to become intolerable simply because they didn't believe they were allowed to leave while it was still tolerable.

We've been taught that good women finish what they start.

That loyalty is virtuous.

That commitment is character.

That making things work is something to be proud of.

And often, it is.

But somewhere along the way, we've confused our ability to endure something with our obligation to keep enduring it.

Psychologists call one part of this the sunk cost fallacy.

We continue investing in something because of what we've already invested, even when those past investments shouldn't determine what happens next.

And when the investment is a relationship, a career, or an identity, the costs aren't just time and money.

They're promises, sacrifices, memories, and the story we've told ourselves about who we are and where we're going.

Sometimes they're a future we loved before it ever had a chance to exist.

It's a strange thing to mourn something that never quite happened.

There's no photo album of the future.

No souvenirs from the trips we didn't take.

No memories of the ordinary Tuesdays we imagined spending together ten years from now.

But the hope was real.

The emotional investment was real.

And the grief is real.

Even when the decision to let go is right.

Even when life is getting better.

We can be fragile and flourishing at the same time.

I wish we talked about that more.

We tend to tell stories about endings in neat little chapters.

First, something falls apart.

Then we grieve.

Then we heal.

Then we emerge stronger, wiser, and ready to announce our exciting new chapter to the world.

But I can cry over the future I've lost and spend the afternoon enthusiastically rearranging furniture.

I can miss someone and enjoy the peace of living alone.

I can be grateful for what a relationship gave me and have absolutely no desire to return to it.

None of those feelings invalidate the others.

And here's another thing that's new for me.

For most of my adult life, when a romantic relationship ended, I eventually found myself looking toward the next possibility.

This time, I just can't imagine anything more wonderful than enjoying the peace I've created.

And that has me wondering why we so often treat letting go as creating a vacancy we're obligated to fill.

We leave a job and immediately start defining ourselves by the next one.

We step away from a responsibility and feel compelled to explain what productive thing we'll do with the extra time.

We find ourselves with room in our lives and immediately start wondering what belongs there.

What if we just enjoyed having room?

What if we didn't rush to fill it?

What if we allowed ourselves to discover what we wanted without requiring an immediate answer?

I spent a long time believing I knew what my future would look like.

And I loved that future.

I understand why the woman I was wanted it.

I don't think she was foolish for believing in it.

But I also don't think she gets the final vote.

That's something I want all of us to consider.

How much authority are we giving to earlier versions of ourselves?

The woman who chose the career.

The woman who made the promise.

The woman who decided what a successful life was supposed to look like.

She deserves our compassion.

She deserves our gratitude.

She may even deserve an apology for some of the spectacular nonsense we've blamed her for over the years.

But she doesn't necessarily deserve permanent authority over our future.

We have information she didn't have.

Experiences she hadn't lived.

Needs she couldn't have anticipated.

And sometimes honoring the woman we've become requires changing a decision made by the woman we were.

That doesn't mean we were wrong then.

It means we're allowed to be different now.

I keep coming back to the woman I've become.

The woman I love.

The woman I wouldn't trade for any of those imagined futures.

Every relationship I've lost was worth losing to get to be the me I am today.

I don't know who I'll be a year from now.

I don't know who I'll love, where I'll go, or what unexpected adventures might find their way into my life.