getting easier

There is this thing people say to divorced women, only maybe it’s just to me: that it will get easier because another man will come along. He will make the money and have the house and insurance and I can hang on his arm and have it too.

It is the age-old trope: a man saves a woman and makes her a life she can live within.

But here’s the thing: I don’t want anyone to rescue me. I don’t need to be saved. I am not a flailing woman. Being unmarried does not make me incomplete.

Here’s the other thing: I am making a life I can live within myself. Yes, I know this isn’t the “easy way.” I know how life can be in the more traditional track. I have lived within that too and I ultimately chose this life I’m more suited for.

It is constant exhaustion, yes. There are days when I realize I have nothing left to give to anyone.

But it’s my name on my ID now. I don’t have to ask permission to pursue my dreams. Choices are mine alone to make and I like this agency I have over my own life—it feels like the world keeps unfolding.

I think one day I’d like to live with my partner, would like to share our interiors with one another completely. I’d like to laugh over the kids’ shenanigans and distribute our incomes where they’re needed and make plans for vacations and plot career ambitions and churn dreams into realities. I would like to dwell in a space with the person who wants not to save me but to know me. I want us to give each other ideas instead of permission. I want us both to pursue our passions relentlessly, fearlessly. I want us to know we’re enough on our own; I want us to choose day after day to go at it together. Not because we have to but because we want to.

I think that’s what I’ve learned recently: how to be. That I am enough. That I am loveable still. I am deciphering what I can’t give from what I can. I know that in the can lies another life too, one I haven’t lived yet but might one day. In the mean time, I can make it like this. I am doing just fine.