The scars are just part of me now, like the length of my fingers or the color of my eyes. They are so “normal”, so much a part of me, that I no longer think about them as having much meaning.
That’s not true, of course. The scars – now largely forgotten – created the man I am today.
The scars I no longer notice shamed me to silence when I was younger. My wife divorced me because I cheated. I cheated because I was miserable and lonely. I was miserable and lonely because my wife and I were barely roommates, rarely lovers, and never friends.
I married her because I was in lust. She married me because she was desperate. We both wrongly believed that it was my job to make her happy. Instead, we made one anther miserable.
I wanted what she couldn’t provide; she wanted what I couldn’t offer. I don’t know how she coped, (poorly, to be honest.)
I cheated.
Somehow, we raised 4 children together. They’re healthier, successful and frankly far better people than we deserve.
We divorced after 25 years of hellish marriage.
It took me at least another 5 years to approach anything resembling “recovery.”
In the meantime, I’d started another relationship. I hadn’t fixed myself from the wounds of marriage. Of course, I fell into the same toxic bad habits I’d developed in my marriage.
More dysfunction, anger, hurt, stress, cheating and another split.
Eventually, my health broke under the stress and strain. It took years to recover.
I finally stopped believing that I was fundamentally “a good person.”
Why?
Because a good person wouldn’t have behaved the way I did.
That’s where the shame came from.
I had standards for my own behavior that I failed to meet. And I had an image of being the kind of person who met those standards.
It took me years to integrate all the loss and failure into myself. Today, I have zero secrets. I’m honest about my failures and no longer shamed by them.
Those were my choices. No one put a gun to my head. They were lousy choices. But I was the one who made them as an adult. I bear the full consequences for all my choices.
That’s life. C’est la Vie.
I’ve made massive mistakes in life. I survived, learned my lessons and keep going.
It’s not sad. It’s not pathetic. In fact, those stupid choices have no emotional valance for me any more.
They’re just “things I did.”
I can’t fix the mistakes of my past anymore than I can fix the mistakes of Nero or Charlemagne or Robert E. Lee.
Today, I make better choices.
The persona I project in public and the person I am in private are now fully congruent. I guess that’s one of the benefits of time. I’m so used to my scars that I no longer even notice them.
I was listening to a podcast today. The host and guest were both still suffering the ragged pains of divorce and bad life choices. The pain in their voices was obvious, fresh and real.
I remember that pain. I remember how all-consuming it felt. Now, I remember that pain the same way I recall childhood friends from decades past: distant, vague, without emotion.
I know they’ll recover. They’ll be wiser, more humble and gracious as a result.
(I’m talking to you now.)
Someday, this trauma will feel no more consequential to you than the turkey you had for dinner yesterday.
Someday, you’ll look back on pain that seems gigantic now and notice something you cannot imagine at this moment:
The pain – once bigger than you could bear – has become too small to notice.
Someday you’ll be so used to the scars that you’ll forget you have them.
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