I haven’t always felt like I had great intuition or a strong sense of self. I had too much fear about who I was. But the past ten years I have really practiced trusting myself, and more importantly, trusting God. I know He will bring the experiences and people into my life that are needed for my growth. I have felt a deep longing to gain more mental clarity and let the fear and fluff fade away in my life, and a strong desire to turn inward and to God instead of others for direction, inspiration, and guidance.
Because of this desire for more clarity, I prayed about the most prominent thing in my box. I was tired of running from fear and hustling for worth. What I found in this box was this: As much as I didn’t want to admit this, I wanted Jed to love me again. I didn’t know what this meant - if I really did, or if it would just satisfy my feelings that I was worthy of being loved at all. I knew this trial was stretching me and helping me overcome some things I needed to, but it felt so real that his love was the answer to my unrest. As much as I knew intellectually this was incorrect, my heart was so set on it being the escape from pain.
I had asked for a divorce a few years before he did, and questioned our marriage again a year after that. I have justified this fact more than I should have. My feelings had little to do with how I felt about him. It was confusing and I spent months agonizing over why I was feeling the way I was when he really was a great husband. Now I see that I was looking for peace, and it would never come from my relationship with someone else. Nevertheless, it hurt him. It cracked the invinsibility of Jed and Tiff. That was my doing.
Which was confusing why it hurt so much when a few years later he had the same feelings. The fact that he didn’t want to be married to me was a big source of shame, contained so much fear, and ultimately dictated how I expressed myself and lived my life. I really felt if I gave up control of whether or not Jed would ever want to be with me again, whatever thoughts and beliefs about myself it stored, I would feel too big of a loss. Maybe I didn’t know how to function with peace because I had never really felt it. Pain was a part of me, and letting go of the pain of wanting him to love me, felt like it would leave too big a void. I can see it was serving a purpose. How would I function in peace?
So I knelt down in my closet, tears of fear streaming down my face, and I gave it to God. I gave up the hope that Jed would love me again, and that if I just kept trying to be who I thought he wanted me to be, I could prove to him that I was worthy of his love. The crazy thing is this: he never asked me to be anyone or anything else other than who I was. This all… came from the stories I was telling myself. But I gave up my idea of what I thought should happen because I knew it came from a very small, skewed sense of reality compared to God’s plan. It’s something I’ve tried to do for four years and felt like no effort was being heard or seen. But that day, I felt a release. Every effort, prayer, and hope to let go and be free was fulfilled at that moment. I think back now and I am just so thankful I didn’t stop listening to that blaring signal inside of me, and that it continued to haunt me so that it could be released and allow peace and trust in. Timing is everything. I slept that night for the first time in a long while without trying to come up with a plan for how I could prove I mattered. I knew I did, and it meant something because it didn’t come from anyone else telling me this. It came from inside, it came from an all knowing source.
When this burden was taken from me, I gained a new perspective. I was shown things that I had done that were a part of the demise of our relationship. I am proud to say I am not as innocent as I thought. I say proud because it feels good not to be a victim. Before, I tried to say, “It’s all my fault that we are getting divorced” because I felt that if it was all my fault, I could fix it and control it. Whether or not Jed loved me was still a gauge of my worthiness. I audibly said it’s all my fault, but internally I did not want to admit I had anything to do with it. I vacillated between it was all his fault and it was all mine. And that’s simply not true. I blamed him because I was hurt. Four years later, I can see that. And I can see how blind I was to my own human-ness because there was so much pain. Pain from childhood, pain from life, pain from things that were hard for me that I didn’t know how to handle, pain from divorce, but mostly pain that I didn’t need to carry - but did. Pain inhibited me - I couldn’t ever hear anything I did wrong because it cut so deep, I couldn’t handle it. Honestly. In a healthy mindset, I can hear criticism and see it as a behavior and choose to change it. In an unhealthy and unhealed mind, I heard, “You are worthless if he doesn’t want to be married to you. You will never be able to change who you are. You do not matter to him, therefore YOU do not matter.” But I can see how pain has pushed me to take a closer look at my life, and it has been good.
God took my pain away, and with that, gave me new eyes to see the pain I had caused someone else. Never in my life have I not hated who I was if I had done something wrong, or hurt somebody. Until I included God - and no longer judged myself according to whether someone wanted to be with me or not. I feel regret at things I have said that have made it seem like my divorce was one-sided. I sincerely feel sad for the ways I unintentionally hurt him. As each layer of victim mentality is washed away, comes a realization of reality-that the way I view myself dicates the way I behave in a relationship. And that we each have our own beliefs and perspectives that sometimes we do not understand from the other side. But it doesn’t make us unlovable. It’s further evidence to me how important it is to heal - so our pain doesn’t spill out onto others unnecessarily.
I could not have realized the things I have about myself, Jed, and my thoughts and behaviors, especially being able to approach it with compassion, in the midst of pain. And I could not take that pain away myself. I had to trust that God would in His timing and I just had to keep moving forward. And I did. And He did.
