The Post-Divorce Reveal
Stripping away the old layers is hard work, but well worth the effort.
With hard work, a little vision, and some courage, you can create a look that can’t be replicated with new materials.
When re-doing an older home, you often have to peel back lots of layers in order to get to the material you really want to work with. Picture a HGTV show where they strip away really gross carpet, carpet padding, and linoleum to reveal original hardwood floors that are perfect for restoration. They just don’t make hardwood floor planks like they used to! With hard work, a little vision, and some courage, you can create a look that can’t be replicated with new materials.
By the time we get to a midlife divorce, I think each of us is that older home in some way, shape, or form. We all have collected some layers - of experiences, beliefs, assumptions, and patterns - that we may want to peel back as we move forward into the next chapter. We may want to change things up a bit, to become more of what we were meant to be, to show off our unique beauty, to reveal what has been hidden.
When writing my previous blog post, I realized that my anxiety is really about wrestling with a deeper issue: do I really want to be seen? The real question might be, more accurately, am I finally ready to be seen?
“One of the greatest human needs is the need to be seen, not for who we pretend to be, but for who we truly are underneath it all.”
Let me peel back a few layers and show you what I mean.
In the years since my divorce, I have taken the opportunity to look at myself, to see myself for who I am apart from the roles I was playing – wife, mom, volunteer, hostess, etc. To see myself for who I am underneath the beliefs that I had about myself and my value to the world. Continuing with my home renovation analogy, this has been kind of like studying a house that you inherit, evaluating its condition, deciding what to keep, rework or replace; then getting to work renovating it, one step at a time.
I stripped off the wallpaper and pulled down the sheetrock. I discovered many masks that I used to hide my truest self for years, convinced that I wasn’t “enough” the way God made me and somehow needed to be more like someone else to be lovable and powerful in the world. I’d been living as if the most effective way to get through life was to keep my thoughts and beliefs to myself out of fear that differences of opinion would lead to conflict and a subsequent feeling of vulnerability that was unbearable to me.
So many walls had gone up. I evaluated each one to determine if they were getting in my way or if they worked where they were. I discovered many ways that I see myself or have seen myself in the past that have limited how I engage with the world around me:
as a wallflower or an outsider, unseen on the periphery;
as a stagehand, making things happen behind the scenes, rather than an actor on the stage, crafting the compelling story;
as less capable than others at making decisions therefore I believed that others knew more or better than I did;
as the ugly duckling, awkward and out of place, as if perpetually in middle school;
as unchosen, a childhood belief that wove its way into my marriage and was exacerbated by the final blow of infidelity.
None of this is uncommon for someone like me, an Enneagram Nine, which I learned about in The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile. Reading this book was like discovering the electrical plans to the house I owned, showing me how it was wired so I could make sense of the light switches and outlets, and giving me the tools to rewire it. I could finally make sense of my own wiring, the patterns of my own thoughts, and the formation of my beliefs. I could see myself as not broken, but wired this way with purpose. I had been looking at the wrong plan all my life, comparing myself to others and misinterpreting my uniqueness as flawed.
Now could be the time to open up your own “power panel” and recognize what changes you want to make.
We are not all wired the same way, so your beliefs about yourself that are affecting how you interact with others are going to be different than mine. Many of the beliefs I recognize in my “floor plan” are pretty common to humans however - as common as a kitchen or a living room in a house plan. By sharing my insights, I hope I can help you open up your own “power panel” and recognize what makes life work for YOU and what changes you might want to make.
Life after a divorce is the perfect time to do a reset and determine if you want to live the life ahead of you the same way or a little differently than before. This is the perfect time for a remodeling of thoughts, beliefs, and patterns and to make conscious choices about what you do with what you have.
What I have learned is that this house of mine is not a tear down, even though that is how I felt after my divorce. This house of mine, this Self of mine, is a hidden gem that was patiently waiting for me to strip off the layers to reveal all of its unique treasures. The way I think about things is just one of those treasures that was never intended to be hidden, but instead shared. I now know that I have a gift of perspective that can shine a light, both for myself and others, when looking behind the sheetrock of Life’s walls.
I’ve come to understand that I am not only an actor on the stage of my own life, but I am the protagonist and the star of my own story. I have the sole responsibility to create the life that I want to live and realize now that I am more than capable of making it what I want.
Through the work I’ve done to remodel the floor plan of my thoughts, I have learned that only I can be the expert in making decisions for me. No one has all the answers and there is not one perspective or belief that is better than all the others.
Post-renovation, I know that when I am feeling like an ugly duckling, I am falling into the trap of comparison, which does not serve me well and distracts me from embracing the unique, swan-like woman that God created me to be.
Most importantly, I have learned that being chosen and loved by myself is more important and life changing than being chosen and loved by a man.
So I guess this brings me around to my opening question: am I ready to be seen?
Yes. When it comes down to it, I didn’t do the hard work of removing all these layers only to cover the real me back up again. I can look at this stripped down, original-condition version of myself and like who I see, and I now have the courage to share that awesome woman with others. Coming to terms with these lessons about myself helps me live more authentically in all of my relationships, not just in dating. This is work that not only improves my house, but increases the value of the whole neighborhood.
I’m ready for my big reveal.