When the life you lost is still right in front of you It’s hard to pinpoint what makes divorce so damn hard to recover from. It’s loss, yes. It’s grief, yes. But it is a type of loss and grief that doesn’t seem to have a clear ending. Not that grief after losing someone we love has a neat ending either. It doesn’t. But there are often moments, rituals and markers that help us make sense of what has happened. There is a funeral. There are people gathered around you. There is a date...

The coping strategies that helped me survive divorce were not the ones that helped me heal. Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash Divorce didn’t just break my heart. It exposed the ways I’d learned to survive when life fell apart. Not straight away. In the beginning I was just getting through the days, doing what I needed to do to survive the shock of it all. But over time, when things quietened down a little, I started to see myself more clearly. The patterns underneath. The ways I was...

Seeing my part was the beginning of building relationships that could actually last. Photo by Lenin Estrada on Unsplash My biggest struggle after my divorce was loneliness. Not the kind most people imagine. It wasn’t just missing company, wishing I had someone to hug, or noticing that it had been a while since I’d seen friends. It was something harder to describe. It felt like something was constantly missing. A quiet, persistent emptiness that followed me around. I tried to solve...