“Loss was not a downpayment on some future consolation. It was just loss.”
From Death and Birds https://www.deathandbirds.com/p/dark-the-night
“Pain comes from the darkness and we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
– From Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath
I used to cling to the quote attributed to Buddha: Pain is inevitable, suffering optional. It reminded me that much of my agony came from the story I was telling myself about it. It wasn’t just that my husband cheated, he cheated because I wasn’t worthy of love. Or maybe I wasn’t attractive enough. Interesting enough. Just … not enough.
That wasn’t always the story I told myself. Some days my story was that he cheated because he was a monster, pathologically self-centred, incapable of genuine caring. But that wasn’t really the truth either.
Whatever I told myself, it stemmed from a desperate need to understand. If I could figure out why my husband cheated, I could control it. I could address my deficiencies, I could demand he address his deficiencies. I could wrest back my life, the one that existed before I knew that my life wasn’t what it seemed, even to me.
It took me awhile to relinquish that control, to shift the focus from saving my marriage to saving myself. “Just show up,” my mom used to tell me, which struck me as stupid advice. Just show up? Wasn’t that what I was doing? Showing up to get my kids breakfast and off to school even as I wondered how to function. Showing up to a book project with a cruel deadline. Showing up for friends and family who hadn’t a clue what I was going through. Just show up?
Just show up. Yes. I eventually got it. It was about releasing my hold on the outcome. It was about acceptance: This is my new reality. A marriage hanging by a thread. A husband capable of deceit.
And pain that felt debilitating. Loss that felt unsurvivable. Both, again, stories that turned out to be untrue.
I survived. And though you will never hear me say I’m grateful for my husband’s infidelity, I will acknowledge powerful lessons learned. When I’m honest with myself, I can admit that I was unhappy. With my husband. With myself. With my life. I didn’t cheat on him but, looking back, I most certainly cheated myself.
Chloe Hope, the writer at Death and Birds who I quote above, went on to say, that “Everything that knows how to become itself does so away from the light. And if we permit ourselves to remain in the dark long enough for our eyes to adjust, we might see what it is that wants to be born.”
I’ve been there a few times: When my mother swallowed too many pills (or not enough, depending on your perspective). When I discovered my husband’s affair with his assistant. When my daughter begged me not to let her psychiatrist commit her to the hospital despite being in full-blown psychosis. Remaining in the dark might be the hardest thing you will ever have to do. Trusting that, within that darkness is something waiting to be born.
None of it is without pain. Without suffering. But within the darkness of betrayal, a tender shoot emerged. With time (so! much! time!), I’m learning to loosen my grip on everything and everyone else and hold tighter to myself. To tend to myself as worthy.
But you don’t get there right away. And simply feeling the loss, experiencing the pain is a rational way to respond. You don’t have to rush to the lessons, skip to the epiphany. You can’t, in fact. Maybe none of this makes sense. Maybe you’ll never really know why your husband cheated, or why you experienced whatever pain is yours right now. The wisdom, if it comes at all, will be earned. By allowing the darkness. By not abandoning yourself in it. By finally knowing that you have always been — will always be — enough.