Separation. Divorce. Failure. That’s how it goes, right? At least that’s how it did for me. Marriage was for life, for better or for worse, and people who got divorced just weren’t trying hard enough. They were failures. Second rate. Oh, I never would have thought of it like that, let alone articulated it, but somewhere in my subconscious that is what I believed. I judged people and I was wrong. But that was before the shed.
When you come from an inflexible, dualistic, rules-based system of beliefs it is difficult to see other possible worlds. Everything is either black or white. Wrong or right. You’re in or you’re out. You belong or you don’t. There’s no room for the gray, messy, unpredictable beauty of life. I was married. I was in the club. And then suddenly, yet not, I wasn’t.
For the first time in my life, without any fanfare, I found myself living alone in a tin shed in the middle of nowhere. A dark space that was sparsely furnished with borrowed items and a few meager possessions. No television, no internet, and intermittent phone coverage. I was alone with my thoughts: “I have failed. I am a failure. I AM FAILURE.”
Love found me
It is a disconcerting thing to be cut adrift from familiar havens into the uncertain waters of a new beginning. Of course I hadn’t perceived it as a new beginning, only as failure, loss, and uncertainty. Dualism doesn’t like uncertainty. It likes things that can be measured, counted, compared, relied upon. It likes rules. And… [Read more…] about Grace in a Tin Shed