Vacuuming While Drowning

I am bereft. Genuinely, but the comic relief side of me keeps visualizing Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice when the world is ending and she is waxing dramatic.

On 10/10, I closed on my own home...and closed a chapter of my life.

After 21 years of marriage, I am alone.

What makes this more poignant is the uncanny way it happened that every single person close to me faded or leapt away over the past month or so prior, for silly and serious reasons.

When I crossed this threshold, I did it alone.

I have no family to support me.

No friends to call.

Some of my customers and students care, but they’re not shoulders I can cry on.

Ironically, the only adult helping me through this transition is the very adult I am leaving.

I’m grateful to him, that he is able to rise above the pain with me so we can help each other traverse completely unknown territory and support our four children while we do.

But the silence from the people I thought would be there for me is deafening.

When everyone sees you as the strong one, it seems they always do.

“Megan’s tough, surely she can...get divorced, lose her entire identity, leave two children behind in a shared custody agreement, walk away from the home she shared, and also offer me customer service while she’s drowning.”

I made a heartfelt post in my FB group about how hard this was. I got a lot of encouraging words, but also DMs from people who remembered I existed because I posted and chose this time, when I shared how I’m struggling, to bypass my customer service channels and insist I help them personally.

And I just don’t know what to do with that. It takes “you are utterly and hopelessly alone” to an even deeper level I didn’t know existed.

The heartbreak at facing such a moment with no one to turn to is indescribable.

And today, the last domino fell. I had to confront someone in a business arrangement who had failed to do a critically important task while I busied myself with falling apart and moving.

When I said, “I’m drowning,” her response was essentially, “it’s your fault for not communicated well enough.”

So even in business, all roads lead to me.

And I am exhausted.

In the new house, the sellers left everything dirty. Not even vacuumed.

I’m paying for a professional carpet cleaning tomorrow in the hopes I can salvage the carpet, because I also discovered half of the kitchen appliances worked only well enough to pass inspection, but not for actual use, and I’ve used up my remaining credit to replace those.

In order to prepare, I need to vacuum for the cleaners.

With every pass, I can feel this pain threatening to overwhelm me.

I can’t fall apart. I have a business to run, kids relying on me, carpets to vacuum and now a huge terrifying mortgage to pay.

But I can transmute the pain. This is how I have always done it.

I believe when we share our hurts and struggles, we help others to feel that they’re not alone.

I haven’t made it, yet, but I know that I will. And if someone is reading this and going through the same struggles, I know that you will, too.

Doing the hard thing can feel like it costs us everything, but every time we look back on another struggle resolved, we find that we gained so much more than we lost.

This has been profoundly true in my 45 years of loss, harm, despair, poverty and struggle, and I know it will continue to be true.

So if you’re barely hanging on, please remember that.

The dark doesn’t last. The pain subsides. And the future is wide open.

Let’s step toward it, together.