The Next Time

I am one of the first of my friends to get a divorce. At only thirty-one-years-old, I told my husband I needed to leave our marriage in order to be happy again. I fell in love with him when I was nineteen, and when we said our vows four years later, I believed with all my heart that we would be married forever. As I learned, signing a marriage certificate doesn’t guarantee marital bliss or personal happiness, or anything really except that if you ever do want to leave this marriage, you will have to go through a painful legal process to do so.

I’ve learned that there is a guarantee in divorce, however, and that guarantee is that it will hurt. It will be harder than you ever could have imagined, and just when you think you’re rounding a corner, a Divorce Landmine will go off–seeing your ex’s new wedding photo, for example–and you are right back where you were when the whole thing began–crying in bed with the covers over your head, a heating pad pressed to your chest, and feeling like you need someone–anyone–to just hold you while you cry.

It’s been over two years since the initial split from my marriage, and while I am truly happy most days now, those landmines still go off, and because I loved him so deeply, the pain is still unbearable when it strikes. This morning, after seeing the aforementioned photograph on social media, I almost stopped a stranger on the street who was washing his truck to ask him to hug me.

I’m serious.

I just needed a hug. I had cried alone in bed all morning, and I needed someone to physically put their arms around me and let me cry.  I needed someone to tell me it’s okay to feel like total and complete shit and to not do anything to try to make it go away except to hold the space for me to feel that shit so that it could pass through me.

I am the only child of two parents who love me deeply, but who are not emotionally or physically present for me. This has been the case for some time now, so I’ve developed a tough skin. I’ve had to, in order to survive on my own. My husband was my family for many years, and now that is gone too.

So I have my friends. And I am blessed to have some of the most caring, loving friends in the world. But since I don’t have blood relatives who will provide that refuge I have so desperately needed amid the ever tumultuous storm of divorce, I have taken most of it on by myself because I don’t want to burden these dear friends. I have laid on my bathroom floor sobbing and contemplating ways to end my life without calling a friend to ask for help. I have spent countless hours, days–months even–suffering, and not asking my friends to stop their lives for me, because I know they are busy. They have careers and husbands and children and fun to be had.

Who wants to stop all of that to come lie with me on the bathroom floor while I cry?

The reality is that while I have the most amazing friends in the world, they are not a husband. They are not a mother or a father. They have their own families to deal with every day, and their own problems. Even if I did call them every time I plummeted into a deep depression, many would not drop what they’d scheduled that day to come help. Maybe they could, maybe they couldn’t, but either way, it’s likely that they don’t realize how serious depression can be, and even more likely that I have not made it clear how serious my own depression can be when it hits.

This is the job of family, to drop everything when one of their kin is suffering. To give them a place to live, sleep, eat, and cry until they can enter the real world again. I don’t have a family who can provide that storm shelter for me, so I must make my own.

But when my depression hits, I don’t want to get out of bed. I have no desire to eat or drink. I immediately lose weight. I am freezing cold, no matter how hot it may be outside, and I have to bundle up in sweats and press a heating pad to my chest and lie in bed until it passes.  And my chest hurts–my heart physically feels like it’s breaking. I cry so hard that my eyes are red and puffy and bloodshot, and the circles underneath are epic. I don’t feel physically capable of standing up or getting out of bed or getting dressed and trying to look or act presentable. And as such, I don’t want to leave the house and go see anyone.

In these times, I need someone to come to my house, walk up the stairs, sit on my bed and just hold me. That is all I need. My friends innocently will ask me to come out for a drink, take a beach walk, or go for a run. They only want to help. But if I took a selfie of the mess that I am when this happens and sent it to them, first they would gasp in horror, and then they would understand that I can’t do any of those things when I feel so awful. I don’t want to be in public when I feel this way, and many times, I physically could not force my body to go anywhere or do anything in this state. My life force is zapped.

Although these depressive episodes are much less frequent now, they have been happening for over two years, and I’ve rarely had anyone–a family member, friend, anyone–just come to my house and sit with me through it.

I typically don’t directly ask for someone to do this. So, the fault is mainly my own. I am embarrassed to cry this hard in front of my friends. The only person I ever felt comfortable being this much of a mess in front of was my husband. And in truth, he did come to my rescue a few times after we split, but that had to end of course, so that we could both move on with our lives.

I know I must learn to let my guard down more and be vulnerable in front of my friends, because these episodes are serious. Anyone who has been divorced, or who has lost someone they loved, or who has been depressed will know what I am talking about.

And for those who don’t understand this deep pain, I used to be one of you. I never used to understand depression. Despite all of the heartache I had experienced in my life, I was, for the most part, positive and happy and looking on the bright side! I didn’t understand people who could be sad over and over again about the same problem! Get over it already!

I am still a positive, happy person for the most part, but divorce has taken me to the dark side, and since I am one of the first of my friends to go through this, I think that many of my dear friends don’t comprehend the depths of it, which is not their fault.

So, today, I have written a poem for those who have someone in their life who is going through a divorce, who is depressed, and who needs your help. You may not be sure what to do for your depressed, divorced friend, but I hope this poem will help you understand us divorced messes a little better, and to know what you can do to help.

The Next Time

  The next time a friend tells you she is getting a divorce

Act as if she has just told you that the dearest person in her life, the person she has loved for sunrises and sunsets, for starry nights and stormy skies, and every moment in between…Act as if she has just told you that this person has died…

Because that is what has happened.

The next time a friend tells you she is getting a divorce

Act as if she has just told you that the dearest person in her life, the person who has loved her at her best and at her worst, who has held her up and torn her down, who has been her everything for too many days to count…Act as if she has just told you that this person has died…

Because that is what has happened.

The next time a friend tells you she is getting a divorce

Act as if she has just told you that the relationship she thought would last forever, the relationship that sustained her, filled her up, tore her down…Act as if she has just told you that this relationship has died…

Because that is what has happened.

The next time a friend tells you she is getting a divorce

Act as if she has just told you that she is about to enter the most intense grieving period of her life, and that a part of her has died too…

Because that is what has happened.

The next time a friend tells you she is getting a divorce

Know that she will need your support more than she will ever admit, and even if she smiles and says she is okay, please know that underneath that smile, your friend is suffering, your friend is drowning in loss, your friend needs your help…

Because she is grieving a death

A death she may have chosen

A death he may have chosen

But it is a death, nonetheless.

The next time a friend tells you she is getting a divorce

Know that it may take years for her to feel better, it may take years for her to feel joy every day. Know that she will be so tired of this grief that she will try to hide it, but it is still there…

And she needs your help.

The next time a friend tells you she is getting a divorce

Know that depression may set in, and depression is a beast, it’s a killer. And when she reaches out to you, you must go to her. Drop your plans, get in the car or hop on a plane…

And go.

Go again, and again, and again, because she needs you, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.

Because there are days when she doesn’t want to live, even if she doesn’t want to admit it.

And because one day, you will lose someone you loved more than you loved yourself, whether through a divorce, a death, or both…

And you will need her too.

The next time a friend tells you she is getting a divorce

The best thing you can do is hold a space for her to grieve, without telling her why her life is so fabulous and why she should feel good.

The best thing you can do is hold her and let her cry until the storm passes.

The best thing you can do is be there for her

Always and forever

No matter what.

*A modified version of this piece was published on The Huffington Post on 11/2/15.

The Journey I Never Expected To Take

As a writer, I am obsessed with journeys. Sure, I love a good fictitious romp–I’ve been making up stories since I was young enough to string a sentence together. But it is in recent years–the years where I said goodbye to my marriage and started anew, anti-depressants in one hand, wine in the other–that I’ve become enamored with true stories written by real people. As I mentioned in my last post, these are the stories that have comforted me in my most difficult moments post divorce. These are the stories that have told me: Someone else has been where you are, and they made it out alive. These are the stories that have encouraged me to keep going.

I started this blog as a way to stop hiding behind my fiction, as a way to tell the true story of what happens when a romance novelist loses her happily ever after, and as a way to reach out to others who may be going through what I’m going through, and to let them know they are not alone.

At the New Year, when I wrote my last post, 37 Extraordinary Dreams ~ One Extraordinary Year, I had it in my head that I needed to go do something extraordinary!, use it as a way to work through my grief, and write about it along the way. Much like Cheryl Strayed does in Wild and Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love, I wanted to go somewhere exciting or do something huge to, once and for all, shed my wretched divorce baggage and move on with my life. But instead of coming up with one big journey to take, I came up with thirty-seven!

I have been hard at work on making many of my dreams a reality–I’ve spent two weeks in France (out of the four I promised myself), I’ve seen my books on the shelves of bookstores, I finished my screenplay, I’ve been dancing as much as my busy schedule will allow, and I can almost do the splits again!

What I didn’t realize when I made this list, though, is that I have already been on an extraordinary journey, one that is worthy of writing about. One that I hope will inspire others. One that I desperately want to tell.

So, logically, being the devious novelist that I am, I decided to hide all of that juiciness in a novel! See #15 on my list:

15. Write and publish my next novel: The Places That Were Ours

Oh, yes, The Places That Were Ours was going to be a novel based loosely…ahem…on the most intense, heartbreaking, passionate years of my life. I figured that if I can’t tie up my own love stories into neat little bows of happily ever after, at least I know my characters can!

So, I wrote the prologue and the first fifty pages, and I pitched the book to my agent and to my publisher as fiction. I went so far as to place my protagonist in a coma so that even she wouldn’t have to face her demons.

Talk about hiding behind my art.

But each time I opened up the document, I couldn’t write past the first few chapters. Something essential was missing. Something monumental…

Ahh, that pesky little thing I have been going to such lengths to avoid: The Truth.

And then, before I could take this book any further, my publisher turned it down. I wasn’t too distraught, though, because I knew somewhere deep down that I didn’t want to write this novel. I didn’t want to hide behind my characters’ questionable choices, their hidden desires, their passionate love affairs, their sweet triumphs and most embarrassing catastrophes.

I wanted to write about my own.

But as it often goes in life, I had to hit rock bottom before I could find the courage to do the thing I really wanted to do. And so, when my next major writing rejection came, I finally, finally, said–and please do excuse my French–fuck it. 

If this is the only story that is surging through my veins, keeping me up at night, begging to  bleed its ink onto the pages, then just write the damn story.

If the only thing that truly matters to me anymore is being purely, unabashedly, unapologetically me, then just write the damn story.

Otherwise, what am I doing here?

As a writer, it’s not my job to write fluff. It’s not my job to keep people happy. It’s my job to tell a story. A damn good story. And so, for better or for worse, wedded as I am to my craft, I have decided to write the story in my heart.

The story that is mine.

The story that is ours.

The Truth.

And so, it is with excitement, a little bit of trepidation, and mostly joy that I announce my next book:

Meet Me in Paris

One Romance Novelist’s Quest to Write Her Own Happily Ever After

What does a romance novelist do when she loses her own happily ever after? Take a lover and travel to Paris, obviously. Or at least this is what Juliette Sobanet did upon making the bold, heart-wrenching decision to divorce the man she had loved since she was a teenager. This is the story of the passionate love affair that ensued during the most devastating year of Sobanet’s life and how her star-crossed romance in the City of Light ultimately led to her undoing. Meet Me in Paris is a raw, powerful take on divorce and the daring choices that followed such a monumental loss from the pen of a writer who’d always believed in happy endings.

I’m close to 100 pages along this wild journey, and I’m loving it. As for a release date, I don’t know yet. But I do know that I am finally, truly, following my heart.

To take a quote from my favorite truth teller…

 

37 Extraordinary Dreams ~ One Extraordinary Year

On Christmas Day, a close friend and I went to see the movie Wild at the theater. Based on the bestselling memoir by Cheryl Strayed, Wild chronicles Strayed’s inspiring journey from total and complete loss to healing and transformation through her solo voyage up the Pacific Coast Trail.

In her twenties, Strayed suffered the crippling loss of her mother, a devastating divorce, and ultimately hit rock bottom before she made the daring decision to hike over 1,000 miles–from the Mojave Desert in California all the way up to Washington State–all by herself.

The film is raw, honest, and so packed with emotion that I pretty much had tears rolling down my face from the moment she mailed in her divorce papers and hugged her husband goodbye, all the way through to her triumphant finish on the Bridge of the Gods.

I came home that night, ever more inspired to write the truth. The truth in this film was yet one more piece of my journey to healing–seeing that another woman can say goodbye to a husband she loves, lose everything, and ultimately keep on walking. She didn’t just keep walking, though. Through her grief, she did something extraordinary, and it was in walking this extraordinary journey that she worked through her losses, her heartbreaks, and ultimately found the person she most needed to know–herself.

And then, perhaps the best part of all–she wrote about this amazing journey and inspired countless other people to keep on walking. To do something extraordinary. To step away from the chaos and find yourself.

Elizabeth Gilbert follows this same pattern in Eat, Pray, Love. A heart-wrenching divorce ultimately set her on a soul-searching voyage through Italy, India, and Indonesia. More than any other piece of literature, Gilbert’s memoir has given me comfort and reassurance that I would not only survive my divorce, but ultimately go on to thrive.

If these women hadn’t suffered great loss, they may never have taken these extraordinary journeys and in turn, they wouldn’t have written these incredible books which became films and have touched the lives and hearts of so many.

The losses, while painful, have turned into something absolutely beautiful. And not by accident. It happened because these women kick ass and weren’t afraid to lay their lives bare for the world to see.

After watching Wild, I went to bed that night thinking:

I want to do something extraordinary and write about it.

I want to use this journey to work through my losses, my heartbreaks, and lose the baggage.

And ultimately, I want to inspire.

The next day it came to me…I am going to make a list of 37 Extraordinary Dreams to complete in One Extraordinary Year, and I will write about it along the way here, on my Confessions blog.

Some of the dreams on my list are more along the lines of mini journeys that I know I need to take to continue healing. Some are writing specific, others are giving-oriented, and some are full-on thrills that I can’t wait to experience. Many are things I’ve wanted to do for a while now, and it’s about damn time.

All of them are extraordinary to me, no matter how big or how small.

Why 37? I have a thing with the number 37, and it feels like the perfect number to me for the awesome year ahead.

Will I write a book about it? I don’t know. If the journey is book-worthy, then yes. But since I’m starting now, I have yet to see what surprises await!

Without further ado, here is my personal list of…

37 Extraordinary Dreams in One Extraordinary Year

1. Do the splits (in both directions)
2. Spend one month in France
3. Volunteer at a children’s hospital
4. Go to a Pink concert
5. Finish my Sleeping with Paris screenplay
6. Sell my Sleeping with Paris screenplay
7. Swim with dolphins
8. See my books on the shelves of bookstores
9. Go to at least one dance class every week, all year
10. Write and publish Confessions of a City Girl: Washington D.C.
11. Write and publish Confessions of a City Girl: New York
12. Dance in a live performance on stage
13. Choreograph 7 complete dances and perform at least one of them
14. Visit all of my best friends at home in Ohio
15. Write and publish my next novel: The Places That Were Ours
16. Write and publish: Runaway Train to Paris
17. Co-write the book on my friend M. G.’s extraordinary life
18. Visit my parents in Ohio
19. Write my new screenplay, an R-rated comedy called The Divorcés
20. Ride the Orient Express Train in Europe
21. Sign my books in Italy
22. Spend time on a movie set
23. Meet Elizabeth Gilbert and thank her
24. Fully forgive myself for the end of my marriage
25. Become financially free
26. Leave at least $10 of Happy Money in random places every month
27. Give an anonymous monetary gift to three people in need
28. Set plans in motion for my “Divorce Angels” foundation that will assist women going through a divorce
29. Give a book signing and reading at NYU in Paris
30. Give my mom a new car
31. Fly in a hot air balloon over the Loire Valley in France
32. Unplug from all technology for one week
33. Spend a week writing in a cabin on a lake
34. Meet Jewel and thank her
35. Go ice skating with my love
36. Kiss my love in the rain
37. Kiss my love at the top of the Eiffel Tower

And voilà! There we have it!

Is this list ambitious? Yes! That’s the point.

This is my year to Dream Big, Take Action, and LIVE!

And when do I start?

Today!

Redefining Happily Ever After

I take my career as a romance novelist very seriously.

First, I must show my main character bouncing through her everyday life, thinking she’s got it all.  A fabulous life, a fulfilling career, the man of her dreams. Easy so far, right?

Then, in that very first chapter comes the juicy part: ruining her life.

It sounds so mean, though! Can’t my sweet, sympathetic heroine just go on living life and pretending like everything is okay? Ignorance is bliss, right?

Well, no. She can’t keep trotting through her fictional life without any conflict because that would be the most boring novel in history. She must experience loss, heartbreak, or some other form of extreme hardship so that she has the opportunity to grow, to change, and to meet the man who is right for her (as opposed to the beau she may have at the beginning of the novel, who is more than likely the wrong man for our unsuspecting heroine).

Eventually, through all of that chaos–the highs and the lows, the romance and the loss, the murders and the time travel–our heroine finds the courage within herself to create her own happily ever after.

Hurrah!

Well, yay for her anyway.

I love my characters, and I love writing romance…I really do. But I have to say, as I was going through my divorce this past year, I had a very difficult time writing those happily ever afters. Why do they get to have theirs when I am losing mine? (I know, getting angry at my own characters? Well, break-ups–especially the big D–tend to make us all a bit irrational…so I’ll have to ask you to cut me some slack).

I began to ask the question: does happily ever after even exist? Or am I feeding my readers false hope? Hope for finding that perfect someone who we’re meant to be with, who we will spend our entire lives with. That’s a big promise…one I was justifiably questioning as the relationship I’d spent the past twelve years of my life in was now…over.

There were days when I would sit at my desk, looking at the beautiful, romantic covers of my Paris novels, saying to myself, “It’s all a load of crap.”

Those were the days when I was wasting away on my “divorce diet” which consisted of Peppermint Patties (a giant Costco box which got me through many months of staring blankly at the computer screen), wine (it’s never too early for a glass when you’re going through a divorce), Stouffer’s Mac & Cheese (I could put down a family sized portion and still keep losing weight) , more wine, and spinach omelets (I had to mix something healthy in there).

Those were the days when tear streaks were the only form of make-up on my face. When every song EVER PLAYED was off limits because it reminded me of the days when things were good, when I was happy, when I truly believed in the happy endings I was writing. The days when I was so in love.

I knew, as I was going through the loss (and still am going through it), that it was only in those darkest of times when I would find out what I’m truly made of.

It was Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, who wrote: “Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation.”

So, we’re not so different from the characters in our favorite novels, are we? Only through loss, heartbreak, and in some cases, total and complete ruin, do we find the courage that is buried so deep inside us, we didn’t even know we had it in us until there was nothing left to hold onto…not even one last Peppermint Pattie in that massive Costco box.

But, once we do find our courage, once we buck up and get through whatever it is that is knocking us to our knees, what about that whole happily ever after thing? Do we hang onto it, hoping we will reach the point where we KNOW we have found it, whatever it may mean for us personally: the soul mate we’ve always hoped to find, the children we’ve dreamed of having, the romance-filled marriage, the beautiful home, the fulfilling career? Or all of the above?

I’m sure my answer to this question will grow and evolve as I do the same. But today, less than two months after I sat in a courtroom thinking this is never how things should have ended between two people who loved each other so dearly, and who in so many ways, still do, I’m beginning to form a new definition of happily ever after.

It means choosing to be happy today. Choosing to focus on the love I’ve been given, rather than the losses I’ve experienced. It means finding joy in the little things: writing this blog post, interacting with my supportive readers, listening to my cat snoring next to me as I type, looking at my beautiful Paris novels and being grateful for the inspiration I was given to write them.

And if I must think of the losses, use them as an opportunity to grow, learn, and change…just as my characters must do in order to have any hope at reaching their own happily ever afters.

After all, when we’ve lost the dreams we once had, what do we have left?

New dreams.

Endless Possibilities. 

Love.

So, really, it’s still kind of romantic when you think about it…