A few months ago, I signed up for a free daily inspirational email message about recovery from divorce*. It arrives overnight and is the first message I read when I awake in the morning. It serves as a pleasant distraction from the pain of scanning my inbox for a message each day from my husband indicating that he’d been abducted by aliens who’d reprogrammed his brain, and that’s why he’d behaved the way he had, but now government scientists have restored his true personality, and he loves me so very much and is wondering if it is too late for us to return to the lives we had before the abduction.) That email has of course never arrived. It has various incarnations in my imagination. There’s the alien abduction of course, but there was also the behaviour altering brain tumour or stroke, the bizarre side-effect of his blood-pressure medication, a nervous breakdown, a mid-life crisis, a terrible malicious rumour about me selling heroin to toddlers or sleeping with his best friend (Othello: grade 10 English class)... Whatever the source of the problem was, there would eventually be that moment at which we’d both leap to our feet with joy, declare ourselves victims of the whims of fortune, and cling to each other tightly, determined to stay so close together in the future that the tentacles of adversity could never again wriggle their way between us.
I confess that I have not stopped watching for that email from my husband, but until it comes, I do however get tremendous insight and value from my daily divorce recovery messages which arrive without fail. For the past several days, the theme has been depression, and recently the message said that you will come out of a depression a better person than you were previously, the reason being that during the depression, you were investigating what you held to be true, what was of value to you and from where you drew your own sense of worth and purpose, or as they put it “"Depressions tell you something about yourself, like a mirror to the inner values that you hold.”
Tomorrow I am going to take that up at some length. If I am a better person for every bout of depression, then by now I must certainly be a role model for Mother Teresa . I am taking me and my crushing headache to bed now- my eyes are crossing and I’m unable to write well at this moment.
* http://dailyemails.divorcecare.org
hope you had a good sleep......I am studying a book with a chapter on depression from a spiritual point of view....would you like me to keep it for you and pass it on when I am finished?
ReplyDeleteLove you and enjoying your blog!!!!!
Auntie L.
Alison did you know that your blog is read by many who believe in you and your goodness.You are an inspiration to the many who silently suffer betrayal and crushing defeat in their desperate attempt to rekindle a love that was never what they thought it was. True love does not diminish, it grows and improves with age. You have been terribly wronged by a man who never deserved you in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAuntie L. : Yes please do hang on to that book for me. I would enjoy reading it. I'm looking more and more to God for answers these days.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous: You can't know how touching and affirming your message is. I hope that YOU have the kind of love that does not diminish and that grows stronger over time.
Dear Alison, I do have such a love and that is why I feel so strongly about your loss. It did not have to be this way and you deserved what I am blessed with. But then, our love is unconditional and every human fraility is embraced and patiently delt with. We have a simple code. Always to be kind and loving with one another. Through thick and thin he is my partner in life. However, it does take time to cultvate such understanding and as with everything worth while in life we must work at it. Yours gave up before your journey had really begun. Alison you and I know that that is not true love. You have been more than generous in your struggle for your marriage. The problem is your partner did not understand the words unconditional, forever, patience, understanding and just plain ordinary love. No staying power and that will never work in a marriage. You did not have a chance with such a boy-man.
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