March was the month, in 2015, that my then husband (now ex) dropped his trans bomb. 

   This March marks a year since I moved out and into my own apartment, leaving behind "our" home, where we had lived for a quarter of a century.   On the morning of the day I moved out I received the news that a cancer screening test I'd undergone was "positive."

   I moved into my new home thinking that I would be sick and die alone.  (It turns out I did not have cancer.) 

   Last March and April were horrific.  On Easter I roamed through the mostly empty rooms of my new apartment (I had yet to bring much furniture from our home) crying, propping myself up against the walls.  The pain from the grief and the loss, and the feeling of being discarded for my ex's desire to dress up in women's clothes for sexual pleasure and release was excruciating.  I remember returning to my apartment from a trip in June to visit my mother, feeling so alone, with no one to greet me or to care that I was home.  
    
  What a difference a year makes!  

   I am by no means recovered from 35 years married to a person who was hiding his sexuality and unable to commit to being a partner, or from the pain that accompanies the dissolution of a long marriage for the reasons our marriages are doomed to fail.  I have not yet recovered my sense of myself as a vital and desirable woman and mate. 

    BUT: I am no longer grieving, or tormented, or devastated by the discard.  Instead, I am not just managing, but learning to thrive.

   I no longer berate myself for failing to make a fatally flawed relationship work. I have become far more social, rather than living a socially isolated life with a person who is hiding his sexuality and self.  I no longer sit in the evenings with my husband, squeezed by the elephant in the room that he refused to acknowledge.  I am comfortable with myself and my solitude.  

I have become far more comfortable managing life on my own, despite the challenges, including financial ones. I am learning how to do the things that my ex did in the marriage, and that I never learned how to do, and finding that I am more than capable of doing them.  I no longer look to the future with dread.  

  I have been through a year of firsts, all the holidays and birthdays, re-worked to reflect my new solo reality.  Though it was tough at times, there was joy, too. My adult son and I have begun forging a new relationship, one that is solely between the two of us, and it is working well.  

  Those who've been where I've been (and gone beyond where I am) will no doubt recognize this stage. After thinking over this milestone of a year apart, I wanted to reassure those who wish to leave but are paralyzed by fear, or in others ways still struggling to leave, that life can and does get better.  You can and will survive and even thrive.  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (March 25, 2019 7:50 pm)