Grief and growth and my promise to you

I sometimes wonder what I have to contribute to this conversation around infidelity when I am so far past it. Sure, I still remember those awful days when I felt both pinned beneath my pain but simultaneously cut loose from the physical world. I would drift between wishing I could just go to sleep and not wake up and wishing I didn't have to go to bed because there would be nothing, at 3 a.m., to distract me from my terror.

But while I remember those days, I no longer feel them. In some ways, it's like it happened to someone else. And I suppose it did. Me but a different me. 

Still, I will come across a comment or a story or an image (like the one above) and think, yes, yes, that's what it was like. That's what happened to me, too.

I'm occasionally asked how I got over (through, I tell them, through, not over) my husband's infidelity. And I have my answer: therapy, my mother (until she died six months post D-Day), running, crying, my pets, a couple of good friends. But there is also this answer: time. It is not magic but it can feel like alchemy. Time alone will not disappear pain but time + therapy + feeling your feelings = healing.

I'm posting this image (credit for this, too) because it so perfectly depicts what really happens. My pain, my grief around what I lost when I learned of my husband's betrayals, didn't shrink. Not at all. But my life grew. My world expanded. I was able to keep space for my grief but not let it eclipse everything else. At first, that seemed impossible. I was certain that I would never ever feel joy again. My pain, my grief, consumed me and cast a shadow over everything else. Even when I felt a tinge of happiness, it was quickly swallowed by sadness. And so I resigned myself to a half-life. One lived without joy.

But I had a moment when I could see that something was shifting. It might not have been the first moment but it was the first that I really took notice. I was walking my dog. It was winter and it had snowed. The sun was out and the snow sparkled, as if sprinkled with fairy dust. It felt like magic and I smiled to myself. I could see the beauty. I could feel that something different was possible. And that's where change happens right? When we can imagine it. When we can open ourselves to believing that what we feel right now isn't the end of the story.

It can feel complicated to talk about grief in regards to infidelity. After all, our husband didn't die. We haven't lost a child. Rather, infidelity grief is complicated grief. But it is, nonetheless, grief.

And so I can tell you this: Your life will grow around it. Your grief will not disappear though you will, as I did, come to place where it isn't raw like a fresh wound but rather leathery, like a scar. 

And I can also make this promise: You are bigger than this pain. Your life is bigger than this pain. You, too, will get through this. Not over but through. And though your grief won't necessarily shrink, your life will grow around it until your grief is not a boulder but a pebble that reminds you of your strength and your courage and your refusal to give up on yourself.