tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21594194.post-63809102017183522912008-06-20T08:36:00.005-05:002008-06-20T16:30:33.170-05:00Ten years ago today, I attended a wedding. My own wedding. Less than six years later, I separated from my husband.<br /><br />A marked existential fissure tore through me directly prior to my departure. 'Nervous breakdown' does not seem an inappropriate term. I ripped in two. Soon I was gone and not looking back. Years of travail led up to that rift, though; it was only that I finally reached a breaking point. Depression, anxiety, incompatible values, sickness, infertility, miscarriage. Rejection. Abandonment. One person desperate for change; the other fundamentally recalcitrant towards it. Our house was badly divided. Indeed, it could not stand. It did not stand.<br /><br />When I left my spouse, I also lost the friendship and approval of many of the traditional Christians with whom I had shared my life for years beforehand. They simply could not seem to accept that I could not repent for my choice to divorce. I could regret the harm my choice caused others, but I could not truly apologize for--much less, turn away from--my decision to end my marriage. Their rejection hurt me deeply. Ultimately, though, just as I made my decision and stood by it, so they did theirs. All I could do was accept that, since I certainly couldn't change it.<br /><br />This acceptance did not come quickly, however. My eating disorder began when my marriage ended, slowly at first. I vomited my lack of acceptance into many toilets, many times over. I refused my desire for their love as I refused my desire for food, even as my body became cadaverous. And my shrinking body told them all--my ex-husband, my ex-friends--to fuck off: I was going to be AWESOME. I had been chubby and self-doubting and needy; I committed myself to become beautiful and confident and powerful. I was going to live on my own terms now, and I was going to show them and everyone else how different that life on those terms could be.<br /><br />Even as I descended into anorexia and bulimia, it was not <span style="font-style:italic;">all</span> pathology.<br /><br />So, I don't regret my divorce. Neither, though, do I especially regret my marriage. Foolhardy and doomed as it might have been, my marriage taught me a great deal about myself and the world. I would not be the person I am today had I not spent those years as my ex-husband's wife, neither either with the eating disorder that followed. <br /><br />I don't mourn my ten-year wedding anniversary, though I don't celebrate it in any conventional sense. I just notice it. Notice who I was then, who I am now, and where I've been to bring me to this present point.<br /><br />I'll break a wine glass to that.T.S.T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/01085803075843600111noreply@blogger.com