I feel shame that I'm still grieving

Today’s episode of the limited podcast series features one of last year’s anonymous authors reading her piece, Definitely not a phoenix. It received so much support ran it ran on the Substack column—many divorced women related to the pressure to “rise from the ashes” as some sort of before/after success story. This piece is a much more honest look at what healing really looks like. I loved the conversation we had after she read her piece, and I think you will too. 

Show Notes

• A writer reads her original personal essay about the summer she took her children to a lake house in Wisconsin — retreating from a small town that knew too much, and sitting with a truth she wasn’t yet ready to name
• Why thirteen years later, she still doesn’t have a phoenix story to tell — and why that honesty struck a nerve with thousands of readers
• The cultural pressure to “rise from the ashes” after divorce, and what gets lost when we only share the tidy, finished version of our healing
• The difference between being a lantern bearer and being a self-help formula — and why sometimes what people need most is someone bleeding alongside them, not someone who solved it a decade ago
• On trusting the woman inside you who already got through the worst of it — and why that track record matters more than reaching any mountaintop
• You can be grieving and uncertain, and celebrate your own resilience.

Quotes:

“I feel shame that I am still grieving and unsure of my place in the world after all this time.”

“I think we’re taught to look for the transformation, but sometimes the truth is… you’re still living inside the question.”

"A lack of mountaintop experience does not mean that you have failed in the story of your own perseverance."

"No matter where you are on the spectrum, someone's ahead of you and someone's behind you in terms of healing."

Follow the Substack here.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Redacted Limited Podcast series. I'm your host, Steph Springer. In this series, we are having conversations with some of the anonymous authors who shared their pieces on the redacted Substack column last year. Today's writer is not here to tell you that she became a phoenix. 13 years after discovering a devastating truth about her marriage, she's still healing, still seeking, and is brave enough to say so out loud. She takes us back to a single July at a lake in Wisconsin with her sister and their families, just after her marriage fell apart and after she reads her story. We have a powerful conversation about the pressure that divorced women sometimes feel to bounce back, to rise from the ashes and to be a success story. Like we can cast a lifeline to others to say, look, I'm healed and stronger than ever, and you can do it too. But frequently what we need is someone who's willing to be honest with us, to sit in the truth and pain and grief of divorce. It was a powerful conversation once again about how healing isn't linear, and also what it means to support one another as divorced women without the pressure to perform and demonstrate our healing in a public way. It's a beautifully written, nuanced piece. And I hope you enjoy our conversation after. I'm definitely not a Phoenix. I'm currently 56. 13 years ago, I discovered a devastating truth about my marriage. That year was and still remains the worst year of my life. Although the worst of the pain is behind me, I still feel stuck there in a way, cozied up with my grief and unsure of what I am to do next. I recall that time in my life with great sadness and great anger, but also with great pride. When disaster struck that winter, I drew my loved ones close and tried to pull back from the rest of the world as much as I could. I knew the months ahead would require me to make critical decisions that would impact my children and me for the rest of our lives. Those were decisions that deserved my complete attention, and they were decisions that I would not allow another person to make for me as I had so many others during my marriage. I also knew that I needed to shut out the opinions and and input of others, which was almost impossible in our tiny town where everyone knew everything about everybody. Somehow a brave woman rose up in me that summer, and I took my children to a place where I hoped I could find the peace and the answers that I needed. I spent all of that July in a big house, next to a lake in Wisconsin with my two children. Their father was not with us, at least not all of the time. He came for a few scattered days during that month. Most of the time he was busy back at home making sure that everyone believed our marriage was fine. The truth was very inconvenient for him. He frequently asserted that I should just come home and get back to normal. He told me that things between us would get better. I don't know if he truly believed that or just hoped that saying it enough times would somehow make it so. Time with my sister has always been a balm for the aches of my heart. So I rented a house that was big enough for her family to visit us while we were there. The days they visited that July were a lovely refuge. We walked the lakeside path into town with our children, visiting the little shops and galleries and eating ice cream cones in the park. We bought flowers and bread and sweet corn at the farmer's market. Each night. We had s'mores with the kids around a fire and watched them laugh and play with sugar highs and sticky fingers. After the kids went to bed, my sister and I sat cradled in our Adirondack chairs with wine in our glasses, watching the fire turn to glowing embers. Much of that time, we just sat quietly because the truth was impossible and talking about anything else felt hollow. A photo from that month of my sister and me sits on a frame atop my dresser. We look happy in the photo. Two 40 something sisters taking a selfie on a beach with a sailboat late in lake and clear blue skies as the backdrop. Our children are somewhere outta frame building sandcastles. As we stand side by side, our bare shoulders are touching. Hers are freckled in a little pink. Mine are brown and look stronger than they felt. The sun is bright, but only my sister is wearing sunglasses. My eyes are squinty in the photo, so the pain in them isn't easy to see. My sister's wavy auburn hairs pulled back in a ponytail and wisps my chin length brown hair are blowing across my face. I remember that windblown hair made us struggle to get one good photo, and it made us laugh. People take photos on vacation so they can remember, but I didn't take many photos that July. Maybe that's because it didn't feel like a vacation, or maybe it's because I didn't think I would want to remember. Most likely it's because my mind that summer was relentlessly occupied with the one undeniable thing that I yearn to forget. Although there aren't many photos, I do have mental snapshots that remain for me. From that July at the lake, I remember how small I felt sleeping in a king-sized bed for the first time in my life alone. I remember a phone conversation with my husband, in which I learned that seven months was plenty of time for me to be over what had happened. I remember many nights spent bearing my face in my pillow so my children wouldn't hear me cry. I remember being out alone in a kayak with the sun warm on my arms, and the lake is crystal clear as the decisions I knew that I must make. I remember finally admitting to myself that his urging me to come home was not because he missed me. I vividly remember a morning near the end of our time there when the wind picked up, the lake became choppy and thunder rumbled in the distance. I stood on the dock looking out at the rough water, cradling my mug of hot coffee, and absent mindedly brushing the errant windblown pieces of hair from my face. The air felt thick and tense as the reality of my next step slipped slowly into my consciousness. A storm was approaching. It would be two years almost to the day before our divorce became final. In the wake of that new reality, the sum of my losses nearly crushed me. I had lost my marriage, my home, my husband, my job as his business partner, and my plans for the future, and my children's innocent rose colored view of life. I had no idea how to start over, nor the emotional energy to imagine a less painful future. I feel shame that I'm still grieving and unsure of my place in the world after all this time. I had desperately hoped by now to be able to write about my very own Phoenix moment. A rebirth from the Ashes is a beautiful, brightly colored new creature. Instead, I'm still healing and still seeking. Although I'm 56, I somehow feel like that 43-year-old who lost her footing when her world was turned upside down. I may be that woman. It's true. But I am also the brave woman who knew herself well enough to allow herself the space and time to find the answers she needed. I am the resilient woman who continues to make the right next decision, even when she's exhausted and scared and unsure of the future. And I am the woman whose daughter recently asked about getting a tattoo. It would be in my handwriting. My daughter told me and it would read. I can do hard things because that's what we say in our little family of three. I am that woman. Beautiful. Thank you. I think one of the things, that I remember when your piece was published on Substack from the comments was this sense of me too about the, that expectation that you are a phoenix rising from the, from the ashes. We've had a couple of pieces where there has been that theme where there's an expectation that we're resilient and we find the silver lining and what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and your piece and a few of the others have really highlighted. Um, I don't know, sort of the inappropriateness of that sentiment. I, I know readers have expressed gratitude when, when a writer says, I didn't just shake it off. I'm not this shiny new me, I'm still struggling. Um, can you speak to that a little bit? I think that I, um, I, I do feel a little resentment sometimes when, uh, well, first of all, we all want to be able to tell that story. And, I include myself in that, that I, I wanted that, um, here, look what I did. You can do it too, right? And I guess that's what I did. This is, this is where I'm at and I am a work in progress. And no matter where you are on the spectrum, someone's ahead of you and someone's behind you in terms of healing. Um, and I, I think it's. It doesn't have to be a finished story, an end of the story where you, you're telling about your successes. It can be a, we're all kind of slogging through. We have steps backward, we have steps forward, um, but we're all, we're all experiencing the same kind of process of rediscovering ourselves and healing. And so I think that's probably where that kind of resonates with other people is that, um, oftentimes a lot of, there are lots of books out there of people saying, you know, I, I finished, I did this. Now I'll tell you how you can too. And Right. That's great. But every, everybody's different. And, um, those aren't as helpful to me as someone just saying to me, I, I'm leaving space for your pain because I am feeling it too. I have felt it too. I. Sometimes feel it, but I'm better now. You know, that kind of a thing. Yes. I think that, gosh, you said that so beautifully and it makes me think of a couple of things. Number one, I always think of lantern bearers in the community of divorced women there. There were women who served as my lantern bearers, and then I know I have been a lantern bearer for other friends who've gone through it later. And some of them are at their moment where now they are becoming the lantern bearers. I mean, it really is a passing of the torch, but I think. To make it more accessible and less shame-based. It's not like you've graduated now you have, you know this, or now you don't feel pain. I mean, even though objectively I can say that I'm so much happier post-divorce in, in the depth of, um. You know, during those weeks and months when life just clobbers you, there are times when I long to have a spouse, again, the stability of another adult under this roof. And it isn't just like flipping a switch. And you know, the other thing that I was thinking of as you were speaking is that sort of destination addiction culture. Like, I gotta get here, I'm gonna get here, and then I'm gonna tell you how to get there. And that's just, it's just kind of bullshit. It's, and it, it has held me back at different times from writing about my thoughts and feelings and experiences because I feel like I don't have anything to teach you. I don't have anything to, um, show you except for. Mess that I am, but that's exactly what we all need to be able to. Yes. That's when people connect is when they're, they're feel, they, they feel real and they see you being real and there's a connection there. Yes. And your piece got so many, it got so many views and so many shares. It, it was one that that deeply resonated. And so it's interesting to think that thought of like, well, I don't have any magic formula. I don't have this. Thing to give you. And yet what you gave readers was obviously what they needed because it was so widely read and shared. And so I just, I think we need to not discount the value we have in, in the wisdom of our very imperfect stories. Um. In the writer's world, there's a pretty famous quote, I believe it's Brene Brown that talks about writing from the scar and not the wound. And I always counter that with the fact that I'm a big fan of writing while hemorrhaging. Um, because I think sometimes you just, you can't tolerate the tidy story of somebody who solved their problem a decade ago. You only want someone who is actively bleeding with you in this moment. Right, right. Or who is like, that happened to me a long time ago and I still feel pain. Yes. Um, do you, do you feel like you are, do you feel like there's a part of you that still wants to have this Phoenix transformation? Or do you think that you've adjusted your standards of, of what you consider to be peace and and healing? I have, um, through a lot of therapies, a self reflect. Really come to understand. I, I wrote, I wrote about it that my pride, but I really have this, this pride for myself and, um, the fact that I was so broken and I felt so broken, but I still, I still had this, um, deep understanding of what I needed and I whatever, did whatever I could to get myself to that point. And. It really helps me today, um, to look at things that I'm dealing with in the now and say, you know, I feel like I can't handle this, but I can, I know I can. I just have to trust my gut. I have to listen to myself. I have to, you know, feel my body and, um, and, and look, I did it. Then I can do it now. So I think it's less of, uh, I'm gonna someday be there and more of just. Like this person that's inside of me, this, this, this soul of mine is strong and resilient and, um, I can trust her to make good decisions. That's so beautiful. I think of something I say often to my youngest teenage daughter when, when we are in the midst of something that feels like a real crisis for her, and I try to remind her that it's not an emergency, but then our mantra is there's nothing we haven't gotten through together. And then I'll tell her there's nothing we can't get through together. But I think to take it a step farther to remove the US from it all, it's you teenager. There's nothing you haven't gotten through. There's nothing you can't get through. And, and that we need to repeat that same sort of mothering towards ourselves, that I have full confidence in your ability, that you are adequate to handle all these things. Right. It's something we say to our kids. I say that to my daughter too. Mm-hmm. Your track record is a hundred percent. Yep. We have gotten through it all. You can do this. It just feels like right now you can't, but, but I'm less likely. I, I now, I feel like I'm more so likely because of I've worked on it, but, you know, you're, we, we are gen in general, less likely to offer that same kind of encouragement to our, to ourselves and belief in ourselves than we are to our kids like that. Yep. And you're right. And also, I mean, tapping into that trust and intuition, but then like you said, also your body listening to your body, like mm-hmm. Pausing to honor yourself and, um, yeah, and, and we really are, we really are equipped to handle this, and it doesn't matter if we look like a crumpled up mess rather than the person standing proudly on top of a mountain. Right. A lack of mountaintop experience does not mean that you have, have failed in the story of your own perseverance, right? No, exactly. Very true. And thank you so much for sharing this story with us, with all of the nuance and, um, I know it resonated a lot with readers and hopefully our new listeners will enjoy it today too. Well, thank you for giving us this, this platform to share our words and, and to connect with each other. I really appreciate it. Thank you.