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Here I am, during a new moon solar eclipse, the day before the Fall Equinox—a time of endings, letting go, and fresh starts.
Of course, this would be the day, unplanned, where I find myself writing what I’ve referred to in my mind for almost two years now as “Number 10.”
In Jan 2024, I made a promise to stay with writing long enough to produce 10 published pieces. I committed to 10 articles for the Love, Loneliness, and Relationships section of Elephant Journal, with the only deadline of “as long as I needed.”
Any writer knows that working without a deadline is both freeing and terrifying. I’ve been round and round the block on what “Number 10” would be about.
“How do I sum up two years of heartbreak, maybe before I’m ready to? And when….exactly…would I be ready? What would that feel like? How would I know?”
This is likely why “Number 10” took the longest and was the hardest to write.
A while back, I spent my 49th birthday in the hospital. While I was able to come home the next day, I was tired and didn’t feel like celebrating, but my request to cancel plans fell on deaf ears and I found myself staring down the candles on a cake trying to figure out what to wish for before the singing ended and it was time to exhale.
“Peace. That’s what I want. Peace.”
I blew out the candles after my wish for peace, without really knowing what that meant for me. Looking back, it was a cry for relief. Relief from the emotional roller coaster I was on in my relationship, and relief from the nagging health concerns that had shown up during that relationship.
That wish put the wheels in motion in ways I didn’t anticipate. And things got worse before they got better. But now, a few years later, everything is different—namely the absence of that relationship.
It’s not possible to sum up everything I’ve processed these last few years on my solo beach walks while listening to music, podcasts, audiobooks, the sound of my own crying, and sometimes nothing at all…just the waves. You can read my previous nine articles for some of those lessons learned, but perhaps the biggest lesson is that eventually we need to accept that we are where we are. Try as we might, there really isn’t a way to move on without this critical step. Simply put, it would be like using a GPS to get someplace without knowing our current location.
An Eckhart Tolle quote comes to mind:
“Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it. Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy. This will miraculously transform your whole life.”
Brilliant, but incredibly difficult to execute, particularly in times of transition, which in and of itself can be painful because although we may have let go of where we were, we haven’t yet landed firmly in where we want to be. So, we find ourselves in a limbo of sorts and have to take the lesson from the caterpillar who transforms into a butterfly.
(Does the caterpillar even know they’ll turn into a butterfly when they enter the cocoon? If not, that makes the caterpillar one of the fiercest beings on the planet.)
That said, I’ve worked hard to accept painful lessons and the mistakes I made, like ignoring red flags in the beginning of a relationship that eventually become the reason you leave later, or finally “going all in” but with the wrong person, and what that means for trusting in love again.
I’ve learned that hope can bloom in the darkest places, even when that dark place is the relationship you’re in.
I’ve accepted that sometimes we need to stop hoping.
I’ve accepted that a few wonderful times together do not cancel the many times that were not.
I’ve accepted that memories, good and bad, are tough. One makes you want something back and the other makes you want to forget it all completely.
The hardest to accept, though, was that what I believed was love, in fact, was not. It was control masked as confidence, which was the very thing that drew me in initially. I only need to read a note I wrote on my phone during a tearful morning meditation on a holiday weekend to know this to be true.
Things I miss:
Feeling comfortable in my home
My bedroom
Enjoying my dogs, watching them play
My dance area of my home
Yoga
My friends
Looking forward to things: events, weekends, holidays
Getting things done in a timely manner around my house
Being honest about all of the above
After writing that, I vividly remember wondering if I could “make it” until at least my oldest graduated high school, some three years later, and then immediately thought about how quickly that time would go by with my son and how I would spend it joyless.
My heart sank even further. The final straw came only one week later, and we were over.
Reading that sad note takes me to a place of regret and down the “What was I thinking?” rabbit hole. But regret takes us backward and off course, whereas acceptance assumes we’ve moved past this and can start anew, when ready.
Choosing acceptance over regret is the real flex.
When I’ve shared my experience, which has been humbling, I’ve appreciated not being asked why I stayed as long as I did. I’ve asked myself that question a hundred times over these last few years.
My answers: First, hope. I hoped long past the acceptable timeframe, believing that if I loved and hoped enough, things would change. Second, and even deeper, I stayed because as humans we hold onto what feels familiar, to old versions of ourselves without even knowing it. The brain seeks comfort.
Now that I understand more about how our brain works in this regard, it makes complete sense (to me) that I found myself in that relationship despite my best, conscious intentions to chart a different course than the ones I had been on previously. Like a game of chutes and ladders, I found myself sliding down a giant chute that landed me right back in my childhood home.
Any of us can look at our decision to embark on or end a relationship as a “Sliding Doors” moment. We can’t play out every possible consequence of the decisions we make, and since we can’t know, we live with (or accept) the decisions we made and the lessons we learned. Would I be here writing this now if I had not experienced the pain of that difficult relationship? Would I have found the great love of my life (me) had I stayed?
On one of those cloudy morning beach walks, I stopped by a bagel shop. On my way in, I had walked past a homeless man in a battered wheelchair sipping a coffee, and I looked away before we could make eye contact. It wasn’t that I thought he might ask me for money—it was that I didn’t want him to see my tear-stained face. What right did I have to be crying over much less pressing concerns than those he clearly had?
I bought two bagels and placed his in a separate bag. After leaving the shop, I walked over to him and handed him his breakfast. His eyes lit up, he thanked me, and asked me to marry him. I smiled and joked that I was too old for him. His humor was quick and he replied, “I thought you might be too old for me, but wanted to ask anyway because I knew it would make you smile. See, now you’re happy again.”
I wished him well and took a seat on a bench that overlooked the beach where my former partner and I first met, which happened to be directly across from a small condo I stayed at temporarily when we ended. I felt the weight of the memories of the beginning, the ending, and everything in between. I thought back to my birthday wish and realized that when I wished for peace, I thought things would fall into place in the way I wanted them to, and how a better approach might be to wish for things to fall into place—and to have the confidence in myself to know when they had.
Maybe that is the gift of a wish for peace fulfilled. I thought about this whole messy experience of heartbreak and decided to accept it as if I had chosen it, because when I blew out those birthday candles, I did.
I smiled, and then heard the homeless man’s voice in my head, “See, now you’re happy again.”
~
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