Life After Divorce: A Rebirth I Never Asked For

An Introduction

I always knew, in the abstract way children know about the distant future, that one day I would die.

What I didn’t know was that I would be reborn before thirty—and that the death I’d face wouldn’t be physical, but emotional, spiritual, and harshly existential.

I’ll be honest: hitting “publish” on this feels fraudulent. I’m not officially divorced.

Let’s call this stage… gestation.

I’m still incubating. Still healing. Still forming whatever version of myself emerges on the other side of this. A full-fledged newborn into the wild, strange reality of life after a marriage that hasn’t even legally ended yet.

And before we go further, let me make one thing painfully clear:

This is not an advice blog.

This is not a self-help guide.

This is not a "professional" anything.

This is just me, telling my story, in case one person out there feels a little less alone.

Could publicly acknowledging my not-yet-finalized marriage implosion make life more complicated? Probably. I know my therapist would prefer I call it an “ended” marriage instead of a “failed” one, but honestly, semantics don’t soften the blow.

I’m choosing to look at this post as a kind of "exposure therapy".

Because there is nothing more real than staring your worst experiences in the face and refusing to look away.

And I need to say this outright: I’m not sharing because I’m healed. I’m sharing because I’m not. Because pretending I’m fine has been eating me alive for months. Because silence is where shame grows mold, spreads roots, and convinces you that you deserved what happened. I didn’t.

And if you’re reading this and have, or are currently, living through something similar: neither did you.

I have a theory—one that’s been simmering in my brain for months now—that this is why so many people never actually face their trauma. Sitting with pain is the most uncomfortable, nauseating, soul-scraping experience you will ever endure. But until you get to the other side, you will never heal.

And trust me, I didn’t choose to learn this lesson willingly. Life shoved me into the deep end and held my head under until I stopped pretending everything was fine.

So…what happened?

For most of this year, I blamed the dissolution of my marriage on drifting apart. We met when I was 19. Married at 26. Separated at 27. People evolve. They outgrow each other. It was an easy, tidy story I repeated to myself because it hurt less.

Then I found out the truth.

I discovered just a week ago—as I am still legally married—that my husband was having an affair and is now in a relationship. With the same woman I once (twice) told him made me uncomfortable… after catching them getting cozy on my mother’s couch.

Yup. My mother’s couch...in her own home.

All while we are still legally married.

“Wound reopening” is too gentle a phrase. This wasn’t a cut. It was an amputation. What made it worse was learning that friends I trusted had been protecting his secret. Smiling in my face while knowing exactly what was happening in my marriage.

Having to still carry his last name every day waiting for things to finalize makes me physically sick.

And here’s the part I don’t say out loud often...

There were only two possible outcomes for me.

Either I ended my life…or I ended my past life.

I’m too much of a coward—and love my mother too fiercely—to choose the first.

So here I am, choosing the second.

Officially killing off the woman I used to be. Mourning her, burying her, then clawing my way out of the dirt because, at the end of the day, nothing is more satisfying than being the one who rises.

This blog is the documentation of that rebirth—messy, uncomfortable, painful, and mine. I don’t know who I’m becoming yet. Some days I don’t even like her, (does anyone have a good recommendation for mirror coverings?) but she’s alive, she’s trying, and she’s refusing to disappear quietly.

And that, for now, is enough.