In 2016, I blew up my life

the let's-look-back-ten-years thingie

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I took that photo up there on vacation in January of 2016. I was 37 years old, a straight married mother of a three-year-old. It was the third vacation of my adult life, and I was finally getting proficient at lying on the beach all day. But when I look at this photo, when I remember taking it, I do not recall feeling pleasure. I remember feeling nothing. Seven months earlier, on a random jury duty stint in June of 2015, I’d developed a crush on an attorney involved in the trial, and I couldn’t make it stop.

To be clear, I do not think a crush is a problem. I’d had, have had, crushes while married. They never lasted long. The fantasies, once started in motion, would run near-constantly for a few days, maybe weeks, then sort of meander to a halt. My crushes were sprinters: I could always see the finish line, and we got there fast. I could enjoy them while they lasted, because they never lasted long.

I remember thinking this, too: I don’t want to be with someone who would help me cheat. Note that I wasn’t thinking, I don’t want to be someone who cheats. I mean, does anyone? That line of thinking seemed beside the point. No, what I didn’t want was a man whose self-regard was evidently so low, who had so little regard for human decency, that he would sleep with a married woman. 🙋‍♀️

But those crushes had been men. This attorney was not a man. I hesitate at the language available to me: was she a woman? Not-a-man? Nonbinary? A butch? A soft butch? Roughly the gender of kd lang? Let’s say this person was kd lang. Yes! Let’s say that.

There was an opacity to this crush. I couldn’t be certain how it would behave. I’d never kissed a woman, never been with a woman, never been in a relationship with a woman. I’d thought I was straight. It’s not that I expected to become a different person with a woman, but I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t. Fantasizing about a man, I could see the whole vista, all the way to the end. Always I could talk myself down, eventually force shut whatever valve my fantasies had poured through. But with a woman, there was no precedent, no resolution. I didn’t know anything, and this not-knowing meant something to me. I mean, there are countless experiences I’ll never have — skydiving, cannibalism, being born somewhere other than the US — and I wasn’t lying awake ruminating on them. But fucking a person who was not a man, who was this particular woman — that kept me up at night.

I remember feeling proud of myself for thinking so rationally like this, for being what I believed was honest with myself. It made me feel sane, even as I Googled her name and then scrambled to clear my search history.

When the trial ended, I told a friend about the crush. I said I couldn’t stop thinking about her. My friend asked if I’d talked with my husband about it. That seems important, my friend said. I agreed. I told my husband. No, I said, no, I don’t know her. I said, I don’t know what’s going on. My husband was calm, reasonable, but I could see that I’d rattled him. I’d scared myself, too. I knew the right thing to do: stop thinking about her. This crush was no different from any other. It would end. I could make it end, cut off its oxygen supply, starve the muscle. And I do think it could’ve been that easy, if the situation had had anything to do with her.

When I stood on the beach and took that picture, I had been trying to stop thinking about her for seven months. All my efforts did have an effect: it left me, as I said, feeling nothing. I remember how I envisioned that nothing: it was like I was locked out of myself, the way a person gets locked out of a house. But then it wasn’t exactly that either; other times I had a sense that I’d gone under, underneath something, underground. It felt like I’d fallen out of my life.

By the end of that month, the end of January 2016, I’d reopened the conversation that my husband and I had tiptoed away from the summer before. It was terrible. We bought a bunch of books on ethical nonmonogamy, and we opened up our marriage, and I had my first panic attack and came out to my mother on a gurney in the emergency room, and the attorney and I went for coffee and wound up on a five-month Tilt-a-Whirl of a romance that left me winded and bewildered. Decision by decision, I blew up my life. I knew that I was blowing up my life. I guess there are instances of people who’ve blown up their lives without knowing it, even as they detonated the explosives themselves. There are movies about this kind of thing. But I knew what was happening, what I was doing. By the fall of 2016, I understood that I could not stay in my marriage, not in any form — and not because of the attorney, who exited this story almost as quickly as she’d entered it. I blew up my life because I couldn’t live there anymore, not as the person I was becoming. I was becoming someone I liked, someone I wanted to know better, someone I thought I might even love someday.

I asked for a separation in August of 2016. He moved out in October. Unrelated, but impossible to not mention: Trump was elected in November. By the following May, May of 2017, we were divorced. That fall, to make sense of it, I began writing a book, and of the three I’ve written to date, it’s the one I’m most proud of, by a very long measure.

Last month the whole Internet was sharing photos from 2016, I guess because it was a simpler time, or some of it was simpler, anyway, or we thought it was simpler? We were all very sexy in 2016. We had less back pain. We had a liberal democracy. But god am I elated to not be there anymore, to not burn so hot or for the same reasons.

Yesterday I read through a partial first draft of The Fixed Stars, a Scrivener backup from December of 2018, about fifteen months into writing. I was looking for material that didn’t make it into the book. I wanted to see if any of it was worth playing with. Instead I found that I was bored — which was a good feeling, a right feeling, a feeling that says the story is well and truly done. At bedtime I finished Colm Tóibín’s newly reissued novella A Long Winter, and in the book’s last pages I found this conversation between the protagonist Miquel, whose mother has died, and a companion:

“You are lucky, you know,” Manolo said to him.

Miquel did not reply.

“You are lucky that this has already happened to you, your mother’s going, that it cannot come again.”

“I wish she was at home, alive,” Miquel said.

“Yes, but you would always dread that this blow was going to come, her death, now you are free of it. It has happened. It cannot happen again.”

It’s exactly quite that, how I feel about the story I lived in 2016, but it’s something like it. I am glad it happened — that I let it happen, that I made it happen. I got free, not so much from something, but to something else.

I had a teacher in high school who taught me something about this. He was my history teacher, and he was stern, built like a wall, but I liked talking to him. We’d sit between stacks of hardcovers and he’d give me books to read, Arthur Miller plays and biographies of leftist intellectuals from the 1950s. He was a socialist, and because of him, I’ve believed in universal single-payer healthcare since I was 17. He hinted sometimes, offhand, at having had a shadowy and less wholesome past, and I knew he had married late, in his forties. He now had a wife he adored and two small children. He died young, when I was in college, of an aggressive type of cancer, but I still think about him with a frequency that he’d be pleased with. He was the first adult to tell me that people don’t really change as they get older, or not the way a kid would expect; instead, he said, we become more who we are.

Of course I didn’t only blow up my life in 2016: I also met Ash. We were set up by an acquaintance, both of us looking for something ‘light’ and ‘casual,’ haha, ‘just fucking around.’ We had our first date on October 8, 2016, and last November we celebrated six years of marriage.

Last month I read an essay by Peter Coviello about navigating a new relationship in his forties, in the wake of a breakup that cost him not only a partner but also his treasured role as the stepfather to his partner’s children. Now he and his new partner — who, like Coviello, comes to the relationship a fully fledged adult — face the decision of whether to have children of their own.

. . . [W]e decided not to pretend there were any griefless paths laid out before us. Every choice, no matter how right, came trailing its sorrows, and no dazzling sequence of moves on the chessboard of living could change this. So it was time, we said, to put away the bright prospect of losslessness.

— Peter Coviello, “Exit Wounds,” from Is There God after Prince?

Maybe that sounds sad, taken out of its context? But there’s something in there I find cheering. Let’s not pretend it’s easy, is what it says to me; let’s not pretend we’ll come out unscathed. You can make a life that way.

xx,

M.

Before you go:

• This post was inspired by the great Hallie Bateman!

In 2016, I had an eating disorder

• The editor and writing coach Nancy Rawlinson has a new project called Radical Process, which is entirely about the practice of memorizing poems. (Obviously I love this.) Read all about it:

  Welcome to a Radical Process!

• If you love audiobooks and hate giving your money to Amazon, I hope you know about Libro.fm. I’ve used it for a few years, and I recommend it constantly. At some point in there I became a Libro.fm affiliate, though I was recommending it before that. Anyway, in that capacity I would like to spread the word that they’ve just launched an annual plan, and while it’s fresh, new annual members get one free bonus credit. (I’m currently listening to The New Menopause, because I am a 47-year-old woman. Hit me with other aging-related recs 🙏)