My Personal Resurrection (Sort of)

Divorce on Easter Sunday

Every Easter, I remember lying on the hardwood floor of my new apartment. Ten years ago to the day, surrounded by boxes I didn’t know how to unpack.
This is a bit about what led to that moment and the decade that followed.

The day before Easter Sunday, 2015, I did the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I left a fifteen-year relationship. Eleven of those years, married.

Most of those years were happy, at least in the way we often perceive marriage to be. We met and fell in love from a long distance, and somehow kept our closeness alive between flights back and forth. He was the first man to send me flowers. Elaborate bouquets of seasonal blooms, always tall like him, with meaningful notes that arrived at my work in the most unexpected moments. When I had my tonsils out at 23, he sent a care package filled with books and funny articles from The Onion. Everything he sent felt custom-made for me. Thoughtful. Creative. Colorful. Careful.

The proposal was a surprise. He chose the ring himself, and it was exactly what I would’ve picked. I took the etched platinum and the square diamond as a sign he listened, paid attention to the details, and knew me.

What made all of this even more remarkable was that I had never been shown that kind of tenderness before. Not in my youth. There was no “good guy” in my childhood home, only a father who was violent and unpredictable. I grew up learning to tiptoe across every room, never knowing what mood might be looming.

Maybe that’s why I thank myself so often for choosing differently. For not recreating what hurt me. For seeking out partners who offered softness instead of control, presence instead of power. For choosing what I deserved, even before I fully believed I deserved it. Granted, it’s never ceased to be disappointing when I’ve found the opposite in men. The dismissiveness and carelessness that appear after the initial attraction wears off, with an expectation that you’ll trade in your worth just to keep the connection.

My Wasband and I were both ambitious in our careers, and together we grew to a point where we could buy a home. I hosted dinner parties and invited friends for weekends. We planted a garden, worked in the yard. The house was filled with fresh-cut bouquets from that garden. First came the daffodils, then the tulips, then the peonies.

It was beautiful, the succession of what bloomed throughout the seasons. So unlike everything I witnessed from my parents. Looking back, I understand now that it was uncomfortable for me to accept that life could be that good. I hadn’t reconciled my past, so I couldn’t fully accept a healthy reality like I do now.

I didn’t leave because we didn’t have something special. I left because I couldn’t find fulfillment within together. I hadn’t figured me out yet, and I couldn’t untangle where we and us ended and I began. I couldn’t keep up the commitment. He deserved someone who moved through marriage with ease, the way he did.

The experience of moving out of the home we built together was probably the greatest act of love I’ve ever been shown. He didn’t want the divorce, but he made the move with me. After the movers loaded my half of the stuff, he followed the truck an hour and a half from Milwaukee to Chicago, stood by me, helped unload the boxes, then turned around and drove back alone.

I can’t imagine how it must have felt to walk into our home with half the walls barren, closets emptied, chairs and tables and sofas gone. The life we built was dismantled by the disarray of a material mashup. I’m not sure either one of us wanted to deal with the remnants, but still, we did a good job negotiating who got to keep what. A fifty-fifty split, I didn’t even need to hire a lawyer.

Our separation left an emptiness we both had to face, a new reality to build on our own. Mine started in that apartment, surrounded by boxes I didn’t know how to unpack. Knowing I had to open them and make an honest assessment of what was inside. On a holiday when other families were out in their yards hunting for Easter eggs, I was bawling my eyes out, splayed across the hardwood floor, nursing the worst hangover of my life.

I’m saving the details of that story for the book I’m writing, but every Easter, I return to it—and to the love he showed me, which still makes me cry in appreciation of knowing a love like that.

Without sounding sacrilegious, I find it a little ironic that my own personal resurrection gets celebrated every year on Easter. That was the day I began to rise from the dead. Not literally, of course, but emotionally, physically, spiritually, and in every way that counts.

Leaving someone you love doesn’t always make sense, especially to others. Sometimes, you can’t even explain it to yourself. When you love yourself enough to spend time with yourself, understand yourself, and condition yourself to receive—that’s not selfish. That’s a gift. It’s the kind of love that echoes, that gets returned in deeper, more purposeful, more profound ways. It’s the love that accepts that he found a new woman before our divorce was final and married her. It’s the love that accepts that you can choose to value those years you spent with another person or belittle them. It’s the love that doesn’t fret over your path seeming risky, weird, and unconventional to others because you know that doing the opposite is far scarier.

My standards for relationships are high because of what I was fortunate enough to be shown by Mike. That’s his name. I don’t want to duplicate anything. Rather, understand it as an example of what a reciprocal exchange of regard for one’s heart has taught me, even when it didn’t last. What it means to let someone go with grace, even when it breaks you. That’s still hard for me, but I’m getting better at it.

A few years ago, a friend asked how I mustered up the courage to leave a fifteen-year career to start my own company. I told her that when I left my marriage, I knew I was walking away from something wonderful. I made a promise to myself not to let that decision go to waste. The same stood for the career I had built. I had to create something even better for me—something so aligned, so meaningful, that the time and energy I had invested would continue to fuel my growth forever.

And I have. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been worth it.

In the past ten years, I’ve made every bold move I once only dreamed about. Moves I couldn’t have made if I’d stayed. I’ve honored the end of something good by building a life rooted in something even truer. A life born from the vow that I will always go for it, get up from it, learn from it, and make something stunning from whatever it is.

I call it my Repurposing Project™—a way of life, and the lens through which I reflect, rewrite, and rebuild. It’s about using every disappointment, mistake, failure, and success to evolve into a higher version of myself. It’s easier said than done at first, but eventually, it becomes second nature.

In the past year, I’ve learned to enthusiastically embrace what doesn’t work out as redirection toward what’s meant for me. That the yes, the no, and the maybe are all, somehow, a yes. The possibilities inside the answers are endless. By being open to them, open to seeing what transpires when I don’t force an outcome, the life that is meant for me reveals itself.

I’ve started sharing my stories this year as I piece together the book I’m writing on trusting that everything makes sense, eventually. Stories about allowing each moment to unfold for as long as it takes, knowing that even the unanswered questions are part of the answer.

Happy Easter to anyone in the middle of their own resurrection.
May your boxes eventually unpack themselves.