How "My Heartbreak, My Rules" points us toward truth

Honesty is simply a declaration of one’s own vulnerability — it is its keen, bright edge — and my own vulnerability and the vulnerability of others became, in the end, a kind of shared armour. I learned that, ultimately, our own truth and sense of self is all any of us have. We are enough, if we could only allow ourselves to be.
~musician Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files

I sometimes struggle to articulate just how deep and broad the change has been to my life since that horrible morning on December 10, 2006, when I asked my husband if he was having an affair, already knowing the answer. One might assume that much of the change has been horrible. After all, infidelity can lead to other dominoes falling – divorce, financial calamity, custody battles, substance abuse. When my mother discovered my father's affair, it ignited a decade of alcohol abuse interspersed with stays at various psychiatric hospitals. It left me motherless for ten pivotal years, from the age of nine to 19. 
And though I felt largely powerless in the hours and days and weeks following confirmation of my husband's infidelity, I can look back and see that I made one very clear choice: I would not go down the same path my mother did. I would do it differently.
It can be hard to talk about choice when responding to a partner's infidelity because we feel stripped of it. We didn't choose for him to cheat on us, we certainly didn't choose the skank(s) he cheated with, we didn't choose this pain. Indeed, our exclusion for any of his choices is exactly why we're in this mess. 
But denying that we have a choice only compounds our feeling is disempowerment. We hold enormous power in the wake of infidelity, if only we can recognize it. And use it.
Which is why I was struck by Nick Cave's newsletter response to a question about his ability to be so honest, to lay himself so bare for the public.
I had created armour over the years to protect myself from..what exactly? Rejection, certainly. Embarrassment. Humiliation. A sense of being excluded. Growing up with an alcoholic mother had left me marinated in shame. I carried it with me everywhere, fearful of other discovering the truth beneath the armour. That I was defective. That I wasn't enough. Not enough to keep my mother moored in reality. Not enough to make her choose me over booze. Not enough.
I didn't know then, of course, that my mother's choices weren't about me at all. They were about her own pain, her own fear of not being enough. Just as I didn't know, on D-Day, that my husband's choices were about his own pain, his fear of not being enough. Her addiction, his addiction had nothing to do with me at all. But I hadn't yet learned that lesson. And so I suited up, as Brené Brown puts it. If I was perfect, I wouldn't be rejected. If I was perfect, my husband wouldn't cheat. If I was perfect, I wouldn't be excluded.
My perfection did nothing to protect me. It only insulated me from genuine connection, from the actual truth – that I was enough, and so was everyone else. "We are enough, if we could only allow ourselves to be," as Nick Cave writes.
Stripped of that armour, faced with the reality that it hadn't protected me at all, I had a choice. You have a choice. Continue to operate by rules that don't work for you, or change the rules. Write your own. The tagline on this site, as I so often remind everyone (and that was coined by the brilliant Steam) is: My heartbreak, my rules.
And those four words change everything. Within those four words is your liberation. They are a battle cry.
Those words are about prioritizing your comfort over his. They are about operating as if your pain matters. Because it does. They are about rediscovering your worth and only allowing people into your life who see your worth too. They are about refusing to go along by rules that harm you, about refusing to stay small. 
It is impossible to overstate just how powerful those words are.
He wants you to stop looking at it phone? My heartbreak, my rules.
He won't stop texting a female co-worker? My heartbreak, my rules.
He wants you to get over it? My heartbreak, my rules.
He refuses to see a therapist? My heartbreak, my rules.
You cannot make him do anything he doesn't want to, of course. But you can refuse to play by his rules. Because, frankly, his rules have actively harmed you. The game has changed and he can either join you or sit this one out. 
What I struggle to articulate is just how much better my life is. And, honestly, I thought my life was pretty good prior to D-Day. I loved my husband, I had three awesome children. But I had betrayed myself long before my husband betrayed me. I routinely trusted others' perceptions over my own. I consistently silenced myself to avoid rocking the boat. I kept myself small to ensure that others have all the room they wanted.
No more. 
I will never say my husband's affair was the best thing for me just as Nick Cave will never say his son's death was good for him. What he and I are both saying is that, out of that pain, as a result of being stripped of our armour is the realization that nothing matters more than living our own truth. Knowing that I am enough changed everything. May it change everything for you too.