The Worst and Strangest Year

I survived the worst thing that’s ever happened to me and I didn’t even get a lousy T-shirt

A year ago last week, I wrote the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write: I announced that my wife of 22 years and I were separating against my will, and reconciliation looked unlikely.

This Wednesday will mark the first anniversary of the worst night of my life: the night I had to leave. I won’t go into the details, but nothing about it was as calm or dignified as I hoped it could be. The rending of a family is an ugly thing.

Many people who go through such things don’t talk about them publicly. But I’m the kind of writer who writes about his experience of life. A memoirist. A confessional writer. There was simply no way to prevent the obvious from showing up unless I quit writing altogether.

And so was born my series, Postcards from Exile, which was about the road trip I took after I had to leave, in the hopes I could ground myself and regain some sense of sanity before I came back “home.” “Home,” in this instance, meaning “in the geographic vicinity of my children so I can have some kind of presence in their lives.”

I’ve spent the past year holed up in a 500 sq. ft. studio apartment that feels more like a cave than a residence. Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful to have a place to sleep and eat and work. I was so devastated when this all kicked off, I wasn’t sure if I would even manage that much.

Reducing my needs and expenses to the bare minimum made them almost manageable. I had always imagined that if I were forced to have to do something like this, I’d use the solitary time to build. What I found out instead was that it wasn’t a time for growing, it was a time for mere survival.

For the first few months, other than writing about the experience, I couldn’t work at all. I was so devastated I could barely function. The road trip itself generated a lot of output, but coming back to Raleigh was the real killer. Other than my wife and kids and some old family and work acquaintances I haven’t spent time with in over twenty years, I don’t know anyone in this city.

A year later, I still don’t.

Nobody to sit with and talk with on the worst days. No pastor to receive counsel from. Nobody to grab a coffee or a drink with who didn’t need me to infodump decades of backstory onto to try to get them up to speed.

Just a guy who can’t stand to be alone with his brain in the best of times alone with it literally ALL the time — while going through the worst grief I’ve ever experienced. Just soul-crushing, make you not want to wake up the next morning stuff. When you can no longer see a future worth living in, your mind goes to some remarkably dark places.

But bit by bit, day by day, incremental progress unfolded. The setbacks have been innumerable — they still happen even now. I spent most of the past weekend in a funk, asking “What am I for?” and “What future could possibly be worth this?”

And yet, despite this, and despite it not being an optimal time to build anything, I suppose I really have grown in ways I didn’t expect. I became stronger. Calmer. More resilient. About two months ago now, my emotional state finally stabilized, like a plane coming out of a tailspin right before hitting the ground. I’ve struggled constantly, but my bills all got paid, if only barely. I’ve fed myself, kept my place relatively clean and well-maintained, I’ve worked a lot of thankless hours without giving up, built a podcast with my friend Kale Zelden that is finally getting some real traction (we’re on track to make $42.99 in ad revenue after 23 episodes and 13,000 watch hours, lol!) and have done some of the best writing I’ve ever laid on the page with my Notes From the Road series.

And now, I find myself at another crossroads.

As I’ve written about, my family moved back to Virginia at the beginning of September. My lease isn’t up until the end of the year, so I’m Shanghaied here in Raleigh until then, alone. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell I could have gotten through this a year ago. My nerves were like a basket of broken glass. And I’m not going to pretend that it’s pleasant, knowing I won’t have meaningful human contact again for weeks, maybe months, because I can’t afford regular visits up to see them. Because of move and family-related activities, I lost three working weekends in a row in the past month I couldn’t afford to lose. I’ve been busting my rear trying to make up for it, but gig work pays poorly and eats a lot of time and energy, and this Substack, though it keeps me afloat, lost 20 paid subscribers this month, almost all of them on annual plans, which means a pretty significant drop in already insufficient writing income.

And I get it: the economy is brutal, and I’m not writing as often as I’d like. The cycle is real. I spend most of my time and energy chasing low-return work for cash today, and that keeps me from building a business here that is more sustainable. I would prefer to be dropping a couple essays a week, and these days, I’ve been lucky to fire off one good one plus a podcast-related post. (The podcasts, more than anything, help keep me sane. They give me something to look forward to and focus on every week where I’m not just trying to go it alone. And the conversations are always enjoyable.)

I’m actively trying to figure out how to get more productive hours in on the things that matter to me so I can spend less on the stuff that’s just mere survival. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’ll just keep grinding until I get there.

And if there’s no way out of the existential disorientation of being a man who identified as being a husband and father right up until those were taken away against his will, there are things I’ve learned over the past year that will stay with me.

First, the marriage, as it was, was unhealthy for both of us. Now, to my way of thinking, that’s not a good reason to end it, because when I said “forever” I meant it and I think our kids deserve the presence and example of two parents who love each other, but that doesn’t take away the fact that while I can’t speak for my wife, I believe we’ve both done a lot of healing over the past year we couldn’t have done together.

I genuinely feel as though I’ve rediscovered the man I abandoned at the altar.

What do I mean by that? Well, for someone like me, who is trauma-shaped into people-pleasing, I have always chased love and validation and acceptance and affirmation from outside of myself, because I couldn’t find any of that within myself. And so, I abandoned who I was in the pursuit of the man I thought she wanted me to be. I wanted her love and acceptance so badly, I was constantly chasing the feeling of, “I’m not good enough and have to change.”

There are good things about that. I was a dumpster fire when we met. I had so much unprocessed anger that was really mostly metastasized hurt from deep childhood and young adult wounds, and my need to be needed was bottomless. I did a lot of stupid things. I made a lot of mistakes I deeply regret. I’ve apologized for everything I’m aware of having done, and I’ve actively tried to correct those behaviors in myself. I think I’ve made a lot of progress. I like who I am a lot better than I did when I left. I like that I feel like the old me, but with a lot more wisdom and maturity than I had when I was 25.

I rarely get angry anymore. I still get terribly lonely, but I’ve learned how to be alone with myself in a way that used to terrify me. It’s certainly not optimal — I still can’t escape the fact that I am absolutely made for relationship, or that the lack of deep personal companionship is an ache that cannot be soothed by any amount of stoic nonsense. But if I have managed solitude poorly, I’ve still done it better than I could have previously believed.

And I don’t hate myself anymore. I no longer believe I am unworthy of love or respect. That doesn’t mean I’m entitled to it, but I hope, inasmuch as I am fundamentally oriented towards a shared life, that I am not precluded from it forever.

My baseline anxiety has dropped exponentially. My life is still frustrating and stressful in a number of significant ways, but I have shrunk my existence and problem set into things I can manage, which creates a stability I didn’t have when I had to accommodate a very different set of tolerances and expectations with someone wired very differently than I am.

I’ve come to better understand — and more importantly, to accept — that my brain is wired differently than most people I know, and the only way to work with that is to lean into it instead of trying to beat it into submission. It took the better part of this year to get me out of the nervous system equivalent of DEFCON 1, but now that I am at say, DEFCON 3, I’ve got some room to stop just reacting and start making course corrections on where things are going.

Something a number of friends and readers have pointed out to me is how much I blamed myself for everything that went wrong. You can see it all through my post from last September. I wanted to put the target on myself, because I knew my failings were many and not insignificant, and I still loved and wanted to protect her. I spent so much of the past year interrogating and accusing myself, tearing myself apart to try to figure out what went wrong, and almost obsessively trying to make sure I wasn’t exonerating myself in any undeserving way, that I feel like I can honestly say I’ve put in the work to try to understand what I contributed — and what I didn’t.

And because of that, I know now, with a certitude I could not access then, that I wasn’t solely responsible for the breakdown of our marriage. Just because those two people can’t agree on the appropriate distribution of accountability doesn’t make it less real. I used to think if my understanding of the story wasn’t validated by her, then I couldn’t legitimately hold it as my working model. I no longer need her sign-off. My epistemology is hard-coded for fidelity to reality. That’s enough for me to trust my understanding.

I also know that despite everything — including some absolutely fundamental disagreements about the whole situation — I don’t hate her. And I don’t believe she hates me. She’s changed so much over the years, but when we get together these days, I still see the girl I fell in love with. My attachment has been broken, but I still feel love for her. Warmth. Recognition. I don’t wish her harm and in fact still find that I have genuine protective instincts towards her. There are moments when I really don’t understand why we couldn’t fix things. I still wish she could see and accept me as I really am, and not only through the filter of accumulated damage. But that damage is real, and I’m grateful that we’ve reached a point where we can deal with each other without animosity. Our kids have gone through enough. They don’t need their parents to be at war.

I have found that my experience of all this loss has re-opened my heart to faith.

When I left Catholicism in 2021, I had reached a point where I was convinced that God couldn’t care less about us. I’d spent so many years begging for help that never came — particularly in my marriage, but also over the state of the Church itself — that I gave up on it ever coming. I came to realize how much I’d outsourced to “providence” that should have taken the form of personal action. I began to believe that I could fix my own life more effectively than an absentee God ever could.

And for a while, that actually worked.

But this past year has taught me the limits of personal action. There are things too big for us to handle on our own. And in desperation, we are forced to return to prayer. The “no atheists in foxholes” line also applies to personal catastrophe, not just war.

Does that mean my confidence in Catholicism has returned? No. But I have become “an agnostic who prays.” Every day. I never strayed very far from the morality I always believed in, because most of it just seems like decency and common sense to me. But in the areas where I still struggle, I’m not purely letting things slide. I’m asking for help. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to re-kindle (or kindle appropriately the first time) a faith in God that is real and substantial, but it feels wrong to expect his help if I’m not willing to put in an effort to live the right way. As any mature person reading this probably knows, we’re all riddled with hypocrisy on this front, but all you can do is take baby steps, I suppose.

And the most important thing I’ve come to understand this year is that my kids still love me very much and want me in their lives. They make me feel so welcome and wanted. They are affectionate and open with me. We talk. We enjoy each other’s company.

This, more than anything else, is what saved me from a much darker path.

But I don’t know what the future holds.

I don’t know for certain if she will finalize the divorce now that the statutory year is over.

I don’t know how my life will change when I move to Virginia later this year to stay close to the kids. I don’t want to go. I like Raleigh, and I’ve made it my own. Virginia is planted thick with memories. We were married there. We had most of our kids there. Every time I go back, I’m reminded of things that are now gone.

But this is where my new mantra, “surrender to the storm,” comes in. Control what you can. Leave the rest to (the) god(s).

As I said above, I’ve spent the past few days really struggling with questions about the future. I no longer have the things that I fundamentally oriented my existence around. I do work that I care about, but I don’t have a sense of mission or purpose anymore. “What is my life even for” remains the open question I can’t answer.

Some people immediately respond to that with, “for your kids.” Yes, I absolutely want to be there for them and for anything they need. But understanding that I’m not with them 99% of the time should help explain why that’s not sufficient. I need something to get out of bed for every day. Something I care deeply about. Something that matters outside of the scope of my own personal tragedy. Something bigger than me.

I don’t know yet how to find that, but I keep getting a quiet little feeling that I’m on the cusp of whatever is next. It’s as fleeting as my dragonflies. It shows up, hovers just long enough to get my attention, then zips away. I think the next chapter will be largely unexpected, and my hope is that it will be better than anything I’ve been able to dream up so far. My powers of imagination have been drastically limited by my circumstances. Still, one of the greatest gifts human beings have is not knowing what the future holds.

I’m choosing to believe it will be better than things have been for the past year. It would certainly be hard for it to be worse!

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On a practical note, it was tough to go into my admin panel today and see that I’d lost 20 paid subscribers. As I said above, I get it. Times are tough. I don’t write here as frequently as I’d like. There are any number of reasons.

But Substack fills in what my other work can’t. I only make about $100 a day, before expenses, doing gig work, and I only do that four days a week so I can do work here and on the podcast. My gross annualized revenue from this Substack is only $21,000. I’ll be 50 next year, and I’m frantically arranging deck chairs on the financial titanic. My kids need school uniforms right now and I’m so far behind I don’t know how I’m going to be able to contribute.

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a paid subscriber, now would be a great time. I could surely use the support:

And if you’re open to patronizing my work just to help me keep going, I’d welcome that as well. Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/Buy Me a Coffee remain the best options for patronage. If you prefer Zelle or X money or anything else, let me know and I can give you the details.

The more revenue I have to work with, the more time I can spend writing instead of schlepping groceries.

I hope this coming year will mark a striking departure from the last one. It’s time for some changes. It’s time to level up and start getting things done.