cosmolinguist | Entries tagged with divorce

Wow. I just read a whole book in a day.

And, y'know, a day that was not lacking in other things I had to do!

I've been reading Lyz Lenz's newsletter for a long time, I watched this book progress and then I've had it on my library hold list for a long time and today it appeared. It's called This American Ex-Wife and it's about her own divorce and her life since.

I started the audiobook when I started doing chores this morning, and unloading the dishwasher while hearing about someone who decided her marriage had ended when she got home from a work trip in the middle of the night to a trash bag that her husband had left just inside the door for days made me feel like I'd been knocked off my feet. The juxtaposition to my calm, orderly chores that I welcome most mornings, and the recognition not of the exact situation but so much that felt like she described feeling then, was a lot.

I enjoyed the book, I got a lot out of it -- not least because she is about my age and grew up so similarly to me that I know I went to an open day at the college she attended (though I chose another myself) even though she never names it. Her book makes me wish I'd written a book, even though hers is about motherhood and the political failure to provide childcare and staying in the Midwest and mine would be about disability and so many forms of queerness.

But one of the things that stands out most strongly to me right now is something a transmasc online friend said a few days ago in a conversation mostly about something else: "It also really bugs me when people project masculinity onto my child or adolescent self in photos. She was a girl. I'm not. Both can be true." I feel that anyway, and this book has made me particularly feel like it matters that I was a woman when I was married. Everybody thought of me as one and treated me as one for almost or entirely the whole time I was married. An agender friend once said they "caucus with the women" and that's how I feel here: the dynamics of my marriage and how it ended fit many patterns and a lot of those patterns are about women and about heterosexual marriages.

Somebody I know online got her Indefinite Leave to Remain. So happy for her.

It made me remember finding out about mine, which is so much clearer in my head than my citizenship even though it was nine years earlier. It was a bright spring day, I had to go to the sorting office and in anticipation of what I thought I'd be picking up I wanted him with me so we both got the bus. I picked up the big envelope and we went back outside and I opened it. And he said "now you can divorce me!" and I kicked his shin playfully but it ended up being harder than I meant to.

Funny how I'd forgotten all about that. I don't think I've thought of that in years.

Funny how he had to make it all about him and his vast insecurity immediately.

Funny how I actually hadn't been able to divorce him before then, not if I wanted to stay in the UK which I did. Funny how we wouldn't have survived those first two years if not for that.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this all day.

You know how you'll get these random little flashes of unbidden memory popping up through your day? In the past few days (or longer? I don't know), a weirdly large number of mine have been about his parents' house. The old one, they haven't even lived there for however-many years now.

Why am I thinking of that? And why the house, the sensory experience of the house, more than the people in it? It's really strange.

But, whether as a cause or an effect, I've been turning over some of those memories in my mind. They feel claustrophobic. They feel despairing at times. I wasn't happy in that sensory environment: sometimes because he wasn't, that was a constant tension when he was around his family... But sometimes I was unhappy just for myself. Sometimes we were just broke and they wanted him there because he didn't have a job to be at. Sometimes I felt like time was just something I had to get through. I wasn't happy.

And I wonder if all I'm supposed to do right now is feel those memories and let myself consciously acknowledge how unhappy I was, because that was something I could never have let myself admit even to myself at the time. Or at any time until this year.

It's a sad realization, the depth of those bad feelings. I'm sad for my younger self but I'm sad in the present too. I guess that's something I can have in common with my younger self.

I think it was his first reaction when I asked if it'd be okay to come around to get some things. "What things?!" I was sheepish about wanting the printer but otherwise baffled. "Kitchen things...couple of books...hopefully my bike..." Nothing you'd miss, was my underlying message.

But he asked me again when I got there the next day. I was in the kitchen, looking through cupboards! This time he explained further though. "I might have thrown some of your stuff away," he said, or words to that effect. I was too stressed to remember them accurately. "I thought you got everything the last time you were here." I think I asked him what he meant and he was evasive. It was a murky train of thought, leading perhaps to unpleasantness and I didn't want that while I was still fetching things of value to me.

But the more I think about it, the more sinister it feels. Friend and I agreed the way he was talking meant he absolutely definitely has chucked some of my stuff. I didn't notice anything obviously missing (except where are all my tank tops, heh). I wonder what it was.

Talking over it again even later, I realize that he hasn't even thrown away normal things: empty bottles, wrappers... They're everywhere. Throwing away anything of mine would've been an especially deliberate act, amidst such a lack of interest in throwing actual rubbish away. I wonder what drove that. I shivered a little to think of it -- not so much the possessions I'll never see again as the negativity behind such behavior.

I've been homesick a lot lately and that masked the fact that one of the things I'm homesick about is I miss him. Not as a partner but as a person I've known a long time, as someone I have things in common with, someone I want to talk to and spend time with.

I'm sad that I haven't seen him since he's had both his vaccines, I'm heartbroken that he's spent almost no time with Gary. I never thought this would be such a drastic break. I never thought the house stuff would go this badly. I guess I'm sad for the last few months that we didn't get to have, that ended up down the other leg of the trousers of time.

My parents, maybe just my dad, keep asking me if I want to move back but they're not really asking me, they're telling me they want me to.

I keep saying "well not now" which is easy when I can't even travel there but last time my dad pressed it: "maybe in a few years?" I hate being asked this. So much. The question makes me so sad.

At first I thought it was just the old familiar sadness of disappointing my parents. And it is.

But it's also that they apparently think that the marriage was all that was keeping me here. Like I didn't build myself a whole life outside that relationship: friends, work, volunteering, school.

I'm sad that they think all that was keeping me here was being married. It's like they don't even think I could find another relationship worth hanging onto even given "a few more years" here. I'm sad that they don't think (at least didn't mention) anything else that might keep me here either.

I guess the only other legitimate thing that they'd accept keeping me here is a really good job. So now I'm sad I don't have a really good job either.

It occurs to me, wearing a sweatshirt and pants that my parents thought they were buying him for Christmas presents, how much I'm going to miss them buying me clothes I can actually wear. So much of my wardrobe is shirts they bought him.

Like me, they were buying stuff for someone he wasn't: someone who wore button-up shirts and can tolerate polyester in his case, something more sad to contemplate in mine. The things they were buying him are closer to suiting me.

Once or twice I idly wondered how I'd deal with the inevitable question of why I moved here if I stopped being able to give that pat answer. "...And he thinks Manchester is the best place in the world" very early became a better narrative than the thorny immigration details.

Because I so rarely meet new people now, I didn't have to handle this question until today, in a zoom meeting. "I moved for a relationship that didn't work out, but I'm still here, I like it here."

I think it went fine. I also think it might be one of the reasons I'm feeling so wrung-out after a meeting that wasn't actually that much effort on my part.

Went back tonight and it didn't feel like my house. Just a place that has some of my stuff in it for some reason.

I was a little bit sad when I first realized this. But I was more relieved. I think it'll make it much easier for me, going forward, if it doesn't feel like my house.

It just happened so quick.

So sad tonight. Just catching up on a podcast I binged a few months ago. Hearing the damn theme music is enough to make me really sad. I don't know why. Just...sad that everything has changed, and so suddenly. My life was so different when I was lying on a different bed listening to these same noises.

Ugh I've seen the cutest Brooklyn 99 valentines today, but the only person who'll appreciate them...

I just noticed the little box where I keep little stuff had a half-used blister pack of meds in it and I just got hit with this wave of sadness.

I've been doing pretty okay but I looked at that and thought "I didn't know, the last time I touched this, that this would be the next time I touched this." That it'd be in this room, my new room. That it'd be a little more than a month later.

Because I didn't expect to leave when I left. Not really leave. I thought I'd be back in the next day or two. I didn't have a plan and I wouldn't have planned it like this if I had.

So I'm gonna keep stumbling on stuff like this (I want to get the next round of stuff from my old house tomorrow, and even though it's happening on the friendliest possible terms I still dread it and having to see that life I put down just for a second but then never came back to, like I was on the goddam Marie Celeste, is part of the reason I dread that). And it's going to keep being hard.

There's this crazy, tiny part of my brain, like the part people talk about that makes them think for a second about jumping off when they look over a cliff or a bridge or some long drop. That bit of my brain looked at the half-full blister pack and thought You should go back. You have to return to your life. You should take these pills and this little box and put them back on that bedside table next to that lamp and those curtains and that clutter and that bed, and you should take a pill and turn off that light and go to sleep in that bed because that is your life and you have to go back to it.

I once read somewhere that the reason your brain gives you that split-second thought about leaping over a precipice is actually to reaffirm that you don't want to do that and so you should be careful and so on. I don't know if it's true but it feels true. It feels like that's what it's doing for me here.

It occurred to me tonight I've been getting more and more sick of what I've been calling a LARPname because it isn't a deadname for me.

And I wonder if it isn't because I'm associating it with all the unpleasant real-world stuff I've been having to do lately: dealing with banks and GPs and benefits and all that official stuff. It's really putting me off my first name (I've always thought of Cosmo as a middle name, and am starting to feel the pull of a less remarkable, a...what I saw a non-binary person sniffily call a cis-passing name as a first name).

I'm starting to feel like that cliché of someone saying "Mr. [Surname]? That's my father. Call me [Firstname]!" except with me it'd be like "Holly? Oh that's my divorce name!"

Something I'm really struggling with is going to my room or something during the day. It really ramps up my anxiety, in a way I don't even notice at first and when I did I struggled to identify it. I eventually realized that I was anxious because I'm so used to it being a bad thing to be in a room by myself.

"Hiding," he used to call it. He hated it. Even if I was sleeping or like cleaning the bathroom, it wasn't like I was hiding because I have big introvert tendencies. It would (should) be fine if I was a big introvert, of course, but I'm really not. I think I'm very poor company for myself really; I much prefer to be around people. (Other people give me buttons too.)

And this anxiety isn't helping me enjoy alone time. But now that I've identified it, it's a little easier to tell myself that it's okay to practice alone time, to notice the anxiety and thoughts of "someone will be angry with me for this" as they come up and gently challenge them. It's still hard though. There is this idea that I always have to be available to other people, which is not reasonable or plausible or expected by these people around me.

I've gotten to the part of the divorce application (you can just apply for a divorce online! (in the easiest cases, which I am hoping this will continue to be) it's so wild to just fill in a few boxes and press next all the time, like I'm applying for a new library card or something; the questions are so much more involved here so how can the aesthetic be exactly the same?!) where I really wish no-fault existed in the jurisdiction where I'm getting divorced.

I don't know what to say next, so at that point I saved my progress and closed the laptop and went to do something else. It's been one of those things I lie in bed thinking about for a couple of mornings since then. Especially because the page said that like things older than six months might make the courts question why you stuck around, so "he unilaterally quit his job and refuses to get a new one," my best answer (like, the one that worked on my parents I think) is going to be about ten times too old. But it's such a big one, maybe they'd understand a little "I tried to make it work anyway..."

What else is there to say? Everything, and nothing.

I had to unfollow a trans FB group I'm in. I saw two posts in the same day that were about people's long-term relationships, in at least one case a marriage, being threatened by the person in the group coming out to their partner as trans.

Not because it's relevant to me, I think just because I'm really sensitive to almost any mention of relationships lately -- whether it be break-ups/divorces or even just the mention of old people having had a wife/husband for the majority of their life, I'm feeling kind of defensive about that lately! Which surprised me. Like I've given up on my chance to have that 40, 50 year wedding anniversary party like we did for my grandparents (and indeed my parents will have been married for fifty years next year and yes it sucks they don't have big families of children and grandchildren to celebrate it with, like maybe they'll get to visit me, woo-hoo...but anyway that's a whole nother tangent), I've given up growing old together. It's another way I feel that rug pulled out from under me feeling.

But anyway, since it happened in a trans group I did wonder if there was any relevance to that at all. For all I started out not just saying but really believing, knowing to the extent that I know anything about myself (i.e. not very much), that I didn't feel any more attached to any gender than any other, for all I really was blindsided last summer when I started to use and then prefer (yeah I think it's funny that it was in that order) he/him about myself, now I wonder if I'm not keeping back some truth about myself because it'd be inconvenient. Because it really would be inconvenient: even without being married I do not want to come out to my parents so that limits the medical and legal things I can do (legal things also limited by not wanting the logistical nightmare of changing my wallet-name in two countries).

So it's like I'm dooming myself to be...fractured to some extent, and maybe there is something there that I just don't want to deal with. Maybe it seems easier to be fine with my name and fine with whatever assumptions people are making of me. At least right now when I'm fracturing so many other things about my life. I dunno.

I think the thing that has surprised me the most is that I really miss being married. It struck me first when I was trying to register with a new GP and it asked me who my emergency contact is and if that's my next of kin. I went right from having my parents be the obvious answer to that to having A be. I've never had to think about this question for a single second in my entire life.

Now (well, not technically but soon I guess, according to plan) I will be living in this country where I'm not related to anyone.

Like just the legal status of it, I never thought it meant anything to me. I'd campaigned for more equal marriage for years on the basis of some couples being denied stuff freely available to other ones, I've argued that marriage is still valuable to the kinds of queers and anarchists who hate it and think no one should be able to do it (I always start with "you have to abolish borders before you abolish marriage if you want there to be any justice in it). So I know there are all these like legal and emotional benefits to marriage (religious ones for those that do, though the religiosity of my marriage never meant anything to me and continues not to) but I never really felt them beyond "I need this to immigrate."

So I was surprised that it felt quite so much like some rug had been pulled out from under me.

People keep saying stuff like "I can't wait to see what you'll be like when you come out the other side of all this" and yeah I'm pretty curious to find that out myself! I just have no idea.

I realized that one of the things I'm finding really strange, in the absolute sea of strangeness that I've pushed myself into, is that yes I have fearsome tasks of bureaucracy and logistics and finances ahead of me. But...that's all. I can definitely do this. I can decide to do it and say that I'm doing it and that's all it takes, in a way.

I'm so used to immigration stuff and benefits stuff where the things I want, the things that are good or healthy for me, the things that reflect my choices or my autonomy, could be taken away from me at any point or never granted to me in the first place.

So I keep feeling -- not thinking, but feeling -- that surely someone has to approve of my decision, surely I have to wait and see if some authority greater than me will allow it. But...no, not really. England isn't enlightened enough to have no-fault divorce so I guess someone technically does have to decide that my reasons are good enough, but that's nowhere near as big as the kinds of things that I'm used to looming over me, determining my future.

It's a very weird feeling to not have that. I'm doing the emotional equivalent of looking over my shoulder waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I actually feel kinda lonely that there's no one there waiting to fuck me up, heh. You mean it's just me, I'm enough?

It's kinda freaky that I've gotten to be thirty-nine and still have this idea that me wanting something is nowhere near enough of a reason to make it happen.

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Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

This American ex-wife

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June 2025

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