After the Break

Often, the events that shape our lives take years to fully understand. This story began with a complete disintegration of the person I thought I was and led me toward a life where I learned how to choose myself. I’m sharing it now because I believe our cracks are often the places where our deepest work begins.

I received some news this month that split me in two...

A few weeks back, a text popped up from an old friend - one who has been in my life for most of my time here in New York, and so one who knows all of my history...good and bad. She reached out to ask if I had heard that my ex-husband was getting another divorce, which, funny enough came as no surprise. I had received notice of his philandering a few months prior (lucky me). 

This is not about my divorce. And yet, I can’t shake this feeling of a narrow escape. 

When I was just 27 years old, I caught my then-husband of one year cheating on me (it’s his thing). My whole world shattered, and I was forced to grapple with a decision that felt both serious and deeply unconventional for someone raised Catholic: filing for divorce. It broke me. I was so young and out of touch with who I was and what I stood for. In hindsight, I realize I chose this man because he seemed to have it all together - and in joining my life with his, I got to enjoy that same feeling, even though none of it was of my own creation. 

It is hard to overstate how cliche and banal the scenario was. Straight out of a soap opera...musical theater edition. Add an expensive NYC wedding that your entire extended family attended, wedding presents barely out of the box, and suddenly I couldn’t wrap my mind around how I had gotten there - or how I would move forward. I did not have the tools to cope. 

So I did what any self-respecting 27-year-old woman drowning in pain would do: I tried to block it all out. Late nights, dreary eyes, a new apartment, and copious temper tantrums in the dressing room as I watched him move on immediately with someone who shared that very same dressing room with me. I was angry most of the time, unless I was numb from whatever the evening brought. I was lost.

I had found yoga just before all of this. I was enjoying learning a new practice that felt embodied and gave me a dopamine high similar to the one I felt while dancing. But once inside the mess of this epic failure of a marriage, I found a home in my yoga practice - in the breath that allowed me an hour to clear my thoughts and connect with the true self inside me, the one being suffocated every other moment of the day.

This practice became so important to me that I decided to become a teacher of its study. It became a supplement to my Broadway career, supporting me through the ups and downs of the incredibly unstable life I had been called to live. I am so grateful to have had that introduction, and honestly, I am so grateful to my ex - because I would not be where I am today if he had been a better person.

And that is what has me thinking - not just about divorce, but about life. The twists and turns it takes, and the way it can feel so overwhelming and final, and often unfair in its bidding. But then life continues on. We grow, and we build, and we love, and we become more us because of these giant fissures life throws our way. 

And then we are given a choice. We can maintain and tend to the cracks in the container of our lives, or we can mend them - like the Japanese tradition kintsugi, filling broken vessels with gold.  Taking the pain and the scar and creating something beautiful from it. 

This is what I learned how to do. This was the gift I was given from this particular shitty hand: how to be more me.

So when I heard this news, unsurprising as it was, I felt relieved. Relieved that I had trusted my gut and left him when I saw who he really was. It hurt so badly at the time. Hell, it still doesn’t feel great to think about now. But this was the moment I learned how to choose. How to stand up for myself. 

And for that, I guess I can say thank you.