I Was So Busy Making It Work

It’s been a year and a half since I left my marriage, and there have been so many changes. Small ones, mostly. The kind nobody would notice, except me.

I started wearing the clothes I love again. Taking little trips. Laughing loudly. Doing things that might seem meaningless to someone else, but feel like pieces of myself coming home.

I didn’t realise how much I had missed these things until I started doing them again.

One day, while journaling, I asked myself, what had been the hardest part about walking away from a sixteen-year relationship at almost 39?

For years, I had imagined it would be loneliness. Starting over. Having to build a life again at an age when I thought I would have figured most things out.

But what came up was something I hadn’t quite looked at before.

How many years I had spent trying to be easy to love.

That thought hurt in a way I wasn’t expecting.

Because I hadn’t thought of myself as someone who was losing herself. I thought I was understanding, adjusting, making things work. I had reasons for why certain things couldn’t be said, why some needs could wait, why it was better to let something go than bring it up again.

I see this in my sessions, too. Someone stops telling their partner what hurts because they already know how the conversation will go. They stop asking for things. They become careful about what they want, what they say, even what they look forward to.

And somewhere along the way, they begin to mistake how little they need for how well they love.

Until, after all that effort, they are still called difficult.

I wonder what that does to a person. To have spent years trying not to be a burden and still feel like one.

I used to think starting over meant I had failed at love. Sixteen years is a long time to look back on and wonder what you could have done differently.

But I am beginning to understand that a relationship ending doesn’t mean the love was false, or that the years meant nothing. And staying, just because you have already given so much of your life to something, doesn’t necessarily make it the right place for you to remain.

The first few months were hard. Some days still are. But the silence I was afraid of began to feel like peace.

And in that quiet, I started noticing how much of myself I had missed.

I don’t have some grand lesson to offer women who are beginning again. I only know that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life measuring how lovable I am by how little trouble I cause.

I wonder how many of us are still doing that, without even realising it.

And when did being loved become something we had to make ourselves easier to do?