Today, I have a piece out at Vanity Fair about divorce. I started the article because I realized I had three friends going through divorces during the pandemic. I knew two of them before and after their marriages, and I was surprised to see how they’d grown and changed during that time. I also felt closer to them recently, and was happy to hear how happy they sounded after the divorce. I wanted to meet other people who felt that way, and wanted to share their stories in a way that would help my friends see they were not alone.
I loved talking to all the people I spoke to. I enjoyed being mad on their behalf, and happy for them after they got out of those relationships. I was amused at how some of them were in new relationships that were sharp contrasts with their old ones.
I have been reading a lot about divorce lately. Several celebrity couples have gotten divorced, though I think Kacey Musgraves has been the most honest about it. I’ve always enjoyed my Twitter mutual Lyz Lenz’s work — and I was so happy when she got divorced, years ago, as I had read this piece of hers with a wild anger for her. She had a thread about divorce recently, where people wrote about when they knew it was time to get divorced.
I was talking to another friend about a friend of his who got divorced. I had met him once, and he’d been going through a divorce then too. But this time, hearing about his new ex, I was furious. “No one deserves that,” I said, overcome with a strong sense of righteousness that didn’t surprise me, but surprised me in how sure I felt about it.
I think divorce is an interesting transition. It’s one of many transitions we can choose in life — or so we think. I have been thinking a lot about transition because I recently pulled the Six of Swords during a Tarot card reading. I had arranged three cards vertically, instead of horizontally, and also flipped over a card that had escaped the deck. I needed to do that because I realized I didn’t feel like I was going through time in a linear fashion. Instead, I felt the past, present, and future fighting within myself all at once, and I needed help to sort through them.
I really like Emily VanDerWerff’s guest essay on Pop Tarot on the Six of Swords. For her, transition is related to her trans-ness. For me, it’s related more to my starting to take meds for ADHD.
I always felt like I wanted to be more myself, and also be someone else. Now I am becoming someone else, but I also feel like I’m meeting myself again. It’s like I put on old school 3-D glasses, and two forms of myself, red and blue, my mind and soul, have finally come together to create a whole person. Jupiter is in Pisces, like it was in 2010-2011, and my new self feels a lot like my old college self. What a fascinating creature! My phone served up a picture of myself that reminded me of what I was like before I received so many simultaneous messages from the world that I was a real headcase. I was a real cutie, actually. (I still am.)
I think transition is about more than moving from one place to another. As Emily writes, “Jamie offered an interpretation based on their favorite depiction of the card — a hot air balloon suspended over a river. Behind the balloon, the shore is aflame. But the shore the balloon is headed toward is swathed in darkness. It’s impossible to see what is coming, but what the balloon left behind was impossible to survive.”
Transition happens when the world we leave becomes inhabitable. So often I have been angry at myself for staying in places -- with people, in places, at jobs, in haunted houses that bleed from the walls -- until the air of that setting was poisoning me and my psyche. Why would I always take forever to leave?
Maybe because sometimes the only motivating force for us is our own survival. You can’t make yourself see what you don’t wish to see until you’re drowning in it. Is transition a choice when it feels like the only option?
I also, somehow, watched three movies about marriage this past weekend: Moonstruck, Palm Springs, Plus One. I’d seen them all before, and I didn’t even realize the theme until I was finishing the last one.
Moonstruck is a favorite of mine, and my friend Claire’s. She wrote about it here. We agree that I’m a Ronnie, and she’s a Loretta. I’m sure you know which one you are.
Palm Springs is part of my favorite genre, the Groundhog Day-esque storyline. Those metaphysical stories of love and connection are my favorite. Sometimes I want to write about it, but I realize I’ve already written a version of that article in this one about Russian Doll, The Good Place, and Maniac.
And Plus One...my friend Morgan watched it recently, and enjoyed the chemistry of the characters. I had greatly disliked the male character in the romantic story, but I watched it again with new eyes, with Morgan’s perspective in mind. It was so much better. I had not wanted to see Ben King’s interpretation of romance and relationships because maybe I related a bit too much to it. At the same time, I felt like he was being ridiculously intransigent -- perhaps because it was a criticism that had once been lobbed my way. I felt like couples had their own way of being, above us mere mortals. It took me a while to realize that they’re still two people together, not a whole new alien being.
It was also funny to see so many weddings, and get a quick sense of...hmmm, maybe that marriage won’t make it. That’s a theme in all the movies I watched: will the marriage make it? The signs are there, if you interpret them correctly. There are several marriages that don’t make it, even if they don’t end in divorce, and several more destined to fail, and a few that seem stalwart even without the marriage label.
It feels in poor taste to be never married and newly medicated and say I know how the world works. But I’ll say that one thing I’ve noticed, from my untrained, unmarried eye. The marriages that could end in divorce seem like two single people in a relationship. I get a sense that relationships that last a while — not just the marriages, but the partnerships, even the friendships, the family connections, the work, the communities, and the mentorships -- are ones where both people know there’s a third in their relationship: their dynamic. A dynamic that lives with them, that needs to be nurtured and treasured and just...noticed, regularly. A dynamic that needs its own attention, beyond the two people it lives between.
One friend asked me if my medication helped me with my relationships. I was shocked; no one had asked me about how the medication helped, mostly because I didn’t stop talking about how my brain felt so different on it. But that means definitely no one asked at all about how it affected my relationships.
But it has...it really has. All my connections in my social spiderweb have benefited from my use of medicine. I’ve de-escalated arguments, proactively asked for help, observed how to best nurture the people I love, and launched large scale, long-winded monologues on how great the people around me are.
Even my relationship with you is different, reader. I’m hoping I can show up in this newsletter more. So often I’ll have ideas, then abandon them out of fear or confusion about what I want to say. I’ve never been good at being reliable when it comes to newsletters, even though I long to be relied upon.
Here’s one thing I’ll say: I didn’t know my mind could be so peaceful. It’s heavenly. I feel like I’m in a dream state, all the time.
Sincerely,
Sulagna