Hi, friends -
If you’re reading this in April 2023, it’s because you already know and love me. So I’m speaking directly to you when I say that I wouldn't be here without your love and concern. Not only would I not be here, on this particular platform—I would be an entirely different person. I would be a different writer, a different mother I am, different friend, different daughter and sister. So many identities I’ve been inhabiting, discarding, trying on again over the last few years as I lost—and this next part must be said aloud if I am to have any trustworthiness in the venture—the identity of wife, a loss which, like most losses, was a destabilization unlike anything else I have experienced in my life. Decoupling from the man to whom I was married for almost exactly half of my life brought with it the aches and pains one might expect. And then it brought a whole lot more that one (namely I) does not (or did not) expect.
In my yoga training, I’m learning about the biotensegrity model of the human body. This term evolved from the term “tensegrity,” which was coined by the architect Buckminster Fuller, and is defined as (thanks, Wikipedia) “a structural principle based on a system of isolated components under compression inside a network of continuous tension.” One can think of the geodesic dome at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville as one example. Another example is the Denver airport, where the footprint for the undulating roofscape measures approximately 300 feet by 1,000 feet and is supported by countless steel cables. Biotensegrity, then, is the same idea—that components under compression exist inside a network of continuous tension—applied to the human body. Importantly, biotensegrity views the collection of tissues called the human body as a single, complex, self-containing system, and not (as almost all our western medicine would have us believe) a random collection of various systems that operate independently from one another, albeit contained within the same skin.
So it was with the end of my marriage. Far from being a single case of subtraction—woman minus man equals woman—the end of my marriage brought with it a complete upheaval of everything I thought I knew about the world and my place in it. I had to recreate myself in almost every imaginable theater of my life, and probably will still need to do in those theaters of which I am not yet aware. I became a different sort of mother, a different traveler, a different lover, a different cook, a member of different clubs and social circles.
Earlier this spring, I applied for an artist’s fellowship, and in my statement of work, I found myself writing the following lines: “writing is one of the ways by which I relieve my suffering. Writing allows me to pin down what was once not only intolerable but, perhaps more distressingly, unknowable. Writing provides a container for the experiences whose value and beauty would otherwise elude me, like a predawn dream or a firefly refusing to glow.” As I continued exploring that truth a bit more, I came to the following conclusion: “Although I wrote long before the end of my marriage, to say my writing has been my lifeline these last few years is perhaps the truest thing I can offer, as it has given me the purpose, perspective, and power necessary to imagine the previously unimaginable—a life defined not by what I lack, but by what I have, and can contribute.”
So here I am, friends, wanting to contribute. I won’t be so trite as to suggest that I’ve learned any cut-and-dried lessons from my pain, or, worse, that I’m privy to lessons that could possibly spare you your own pain. (That’s not how life works, I don’t think.) But I am here to say, this is who I am now. I have found ways to get out of bed (slowly, full of resistance, hating my husband and the world and myself most of all) more often than not. And have learned to understand that perhaps the days I couldn’t get out of bed, bed was the thing I most needed on those days. I leaned in—hard— to words of all kinds (poetry and cookbooks and fiction and song lyrics and Instagram memes and self-help websites and memoirs), introspection / exploration, and enough sobbing to sink a small island. Plus my children and my Chicago family and friends and dogs and the trees up and down Saint Louis Street and Lake Michigan and a whole lot of tea. Thank goodness for all of you.
Reading your writing makes me think of the song “Killing me Softly with his Song” (either the Roberta Flack OG version and the Fugees remix) You write what I feel but didn’t realize. From a place of honesty and vulnerability comes such power.