NewFly,
    Right after the divorce is a hard time, even when you've been separated for a year.  Divorce finalizes the split and kills off any faint, residual hope.  However, it also initiates a new stage, and frees you to begin healing and looking forward to your own life.  Up to the divorce, it's "soon I can be free and look forward."  Afterwards, it is free agency, which can feel scary, especially at first, but then becomes something wonderful.  For one thing, all those years of living in a situation that you had no control over and couldn't fix is replaced by a life in which you have the freedom to look a problem or challenge in the eye and get down to fixing or solving it.  
   Working with your ex is definitely tough.  Because my ex remains in his closet, I found working with him--and I worked in the same small department as he did--was a daily trauma.  Whether with enough time and the healing distance brings it would have gotten better I don't know, but I decided that to interact with him as he stayed closeted was to further the lie and help hide his secret life.  I couldn't do that, so I retired.  You probably have over the past year of separation already developed some strategies for dealing with him at work; I found BIFF (brief, informative, firm, friendly) and "grey rock" particularly helpful "prompts" I could repeat to myself to help shore up my resolve when I had to interact with him.  Imagining him as a pathetic shriveled up balloon...I like it.

karma8mykeys, 
   I'm glad my post came at the right time for you.  I have no doubt your husband's insulting devaluation of you as "the 'maid'" was a direct response to his resentment that you are "more talented, more intuitive, more intelligent and more successful."  You nailed it in one with his "hating me for it and hating me more for needing me as his beard."  I've thought often that my trans-identified ex both envied me for my femaleness and resented me for having it when he couldn't.  I am what he wants to be, and because he can't be that, he took out his resentment on me in so many ways, including by assaulting my sense of myself as a woman, and making me feel as if I were less than he on many, many fronts, including professionally (we did the same job at the same rank). 
    Reading your post made me think about how a balloon is exactly the right object to represent him.  He is all empty casing, am empty shell, and without being tethered to someone's wrist, he floats off to "wander lonely as a cloud" (a Wordsworth reference).  

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (July 21, 2019 5:57 am)