I’ve realized that one of the reasons I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the whole you can tell she’s a strong female character because she spends all of her time rolling her eyes and threatening to punch the boys (as seen in The Maze Runner, for example) is that as a teenager I basically was that character. I spent a lot of my time threatening to punch people and hanging with the guys by being pretty aggressive.
You know what that got me told? You’re not like other girls. You’re cool.
And in a sort of chicken and egg feedback loop, that made me willing to laugh at and tacitly encourage some incredibly misogynist joking and “pranks.” Which also, by the way, apparently later fed into the idea that I was a butch lesbian and it was totally cool for guys to engage in some pretty sexist banter about various other women with me.
I’m ashamed of a lot of that in retrospect.
I obviously don’t think there’s anything wrong with being butch or having a masculine presentation. (Duh.) But the more I think about how that so often translates out into buying in to the most toxic aspects of masculinity:
Casual violence
Casual misogyny
Belief that the masculine is on its face superior to the feminine
Being not like the other girls or cool means abandoning other women and considering them inferior
…the more it really upsets me.
I’d like kids who were like me, struggling with being a girl while finding the feminine an ill-fitting societal construct, to be able to read about characters like them. I pretty much stopped reading books about girls/women at that age because I was reading adult SF/F and there weren’t a whole lot of female main characters to begin with, but also because in all honesty, reading about female characters putting on makeup and dresses and carrying their vampire killing guns in their purses—all of which are perfectly okay things, please don’t get me wrong here—made me feel inadequate and like an outsider. Like my books were telling me I was doing the whole being a girl thing wrong. And at that point, I generally defaulted to reading about men, because at least men got to wear trousers and sensible shoes.
(Nowadays, I do not have a problem with this any more. Probably because I’m no longer an adolescent, self-hating hot mess, and I’ve also developed a lot more empathy as a reader; I like reading about people who are very different from me.)
So basically what I’m saying is that I want to see female characters who are strong in a lot of different ways. And I want to see female characters who get to be “masculine” without doing it in a toxic, hurtful way. I want to see “masculinity” used as a character trait, not the marker that a character is different and better and strong.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, there are some more kind of nitty-gritty things about divorce that I want to talk about, because I think they’re dumb or annoying or just kind of funny.
It’s okay that we’re okay.
While we were going through the whole process, we kept having these weird conversations, just randomly. Mostly in the car, since thats when our housemate isn’t around. Where one of us would just say something like, “We’re not arguing about anything. I feel like there’s something wrong with us.”
Mike and I never did much arguing before, but there is this mental image you get of divorce, where there is shouting and tears and throwing things perhaps. There was a little crying while we were figuring things out. There’s always crying when something ends, just because endings are always sad even when they lead into new beginnings. But there weren’t hard feelings. There wasn’t shouting. And it felt… kind of weird that there weren’t, in a way. Like we were somehow doing it wrong.
We had a lot of conversations that started like this, going in both directions:
“Are you still okay?” “I’m okay.” “Why does it feel weird that we’re both okay?”
It’s okay that we didn’t want to argue. It’s okay that there are no hard feelings. (In fact, it’s better that there are no hard feelings!) It’s okay that we’re okay. I figure not a lot of people get to be in this position, but it’s a place that exists. And if you find yourself in that place, don’t feel weird about it.
And everyone, I know it’s super weird when someone tells you they’ve gotten divorced, and you’re not sure how to respond. And it’s probably even weirder when the people in question are both happy and okay with everything. It feels weird to congratulate people on something society in general says is a terrible thing.
But hey, you can always congratulate us on the fact that we’re still BFFs. We don’t feel like us getting divorced was a bad thing. We don’t want anyone else to feel that way either.
It’s way easier to get married than divorced
The more I think about this, the more it annoys me, to be honest. Like, I get that there are certain things that make getting divorced way more complicated than getting married; the division of property, and heaven help you if you have kids. (And I’m glad we didn’t have kids, because that’s a whole other set of people who you really have to put first… but anyway.) But it is just materially much more difficult to get divorced than married.
When Mike and I got married, we went to the DMV to get the license, didn’t have to wait at all, paid $30 and answered a few questions (eg: are you brother and sister?) and that was it. Then all we had to do was sign the thing with witnesses and there you go. Married. If you don’t count the big party we threw for signing our piece of paper, getting married was cheaper than dinner and a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse. We also didn’t even have to even be residents of Colorado.
Filing for divorce was exponentially harder. And I mean that in a literal sense as well; we had to pay nearly ten times as much just to file the paperwork. (Now if we’d gotten married in Houston, we would have had to bay $71 for the license, which is around 1/4 of the divorce filing fee.) We had to have lived in Texas for at least six months and Houston for at least three, thankfully not a problem for us. And then there was a sixty day waiting period, between when we filed the original petition and when we could even go before the judge to get the final decree approved.
Like I said, I get that a lot of that has to do with just the legal messiness of untangling property, which is why you need to drag a judge into things. I even get keeping the judge in the uncontested divorce loop and wanting their approval on the final decree, because they’re there to make sure someone doesn’t get totally fucked because of a mistake or malicious design.
But a sixty day waiting period? Why isn’t there a sixty day waiting period for marriages? Even states that have “cooling off” periods for wedding licenses, they’re nothing like sixty freaking days.
This is not to say my marriage to Mike was some kind of mistake and we wouldn’t have done it if we’d had to wait two months. At that point, we’d been living together for over five years. I’m just saying that making people wait the same amount for a marriage as they have to wait for a divorce just seems a lot more fair. And it also feels really wrong to me, to make it super easy to get married, to the point that you can quite literally get married on a whim in many states, and then make it difficult and much more expensive and humiliating to end a marriage.
Anyone who is against no-fault divorce is either severely misguided or downright evil.
Considering Texas’s hyper conservative reputation, it might come as a surprise that it’s a no-fault divorce state. (Actually, according to Wikipedia, the whole US has been no fault since 2010, which is cool.) But that meant when I went before the judge and asked for a divorce, the reason I provided was quite literally:
My marriage to my spouse has become insupportable because of a discord or conflict of personalities that destroys the legitimate ends of the marriage relationship.
Which basically means “this marriage isn’t working out for reasons that aren’t anyone’s fault, please let us out.” And that is so. Incredibly. Important. For Mike and I, this was precisely the reason for our divorce. We’d grown to a place where we just didn’t feel that way about each other any more and no longer wanted to be married.
I don’t want to get too melodramatic here, but this is important. We’re still incredibly good friends because we were able to decide that we didn’t want to be married any more, and then the state accepted that as a reason. This meant that neither of us felt trapped. Neither of us got put in a position where we could resent the other person. This allowed us to end that part of our relationship on incredibly good, cooperative, friendly terms.
If no-fault divorce wasn’t allowed, we would have needed a reason like abuse (not gonna happen) or adultery. And even when you’re both on the same side, being legally forced to blame someone for something that really requires no blame… I don’t think that would have felt very good for either of us. It wouldn’t have been fair. Sometimes things happen that aren’t anyone’s fault. There’s enough baggage on the entire word of divorce without the state forcing you to point the finger at someone and legally shame them.
I want to point this out because I remember in Colorado, political ads for certain candidates expounding upon the evils of no-fault divorce. There’s ongoing backlash and a definite sector of people in this country who would like to get rid of this kind of divorce, and their reasoning is total bullshit. Divorce is already difficult enough. Legally forcing Mike and I to remain married would not have caused us to somehow start loving each other in that way again. But it would have been a great way to destroy our friendship.
Everyone expects you to want to have nothing to do with each other any more.
I guess maybe because that’s the way it most commonly goes? But it’s been kind of weird in that respect. We actually ended up paying a lawyer to write up our final decree for us even just because if you download the form and want to fill it out yourself, there’s an assumption that everything is going to belong to either one person or the other. We wanted to keep one of our bank accounts jointly owned (so we could pay rent and bills out of it since we’re still housemates) and also keep the house we own at 50/50 while not having to just sell it and split it. They don’t make that easy to figure out.
And yes, we’re still housemates. We’re BFFs. We’re just really relieved to be sleeping in separate rooms. I know it’s kind of weird considering how these things normally go, but it’s worked for us.
My ties are incredibly powerful.
They tell you to dress nice for court. So I did, which included one of my power ties. I needed the confidence boost, man. Going in front of a judge is a nerve-wracking thing even if you have no-fault on your side. During my time at court, I got mistaken for a lawyer countless times (I guess only lawyers wear ties?) and caused several people some severe gender confusion.
It kind of made my day.
(Bonus: I was on crutches the entire time.)
Cake
Because yes, there was divorce cake. It was not as awesome as the wedding cake.
I tend to be very careful, out here on the internet, about when and how I speak about my personal life. Ridiculous bitching about my period? Sure, why not. Navel-gazing about weight and body image? Sure. But all of those things are about me. When it comes to the people in my life and how I relate to them, I am ferociously protective of their privacy. Their lives are not for me to talk about.
I’m going to make an exception here, with Mike’s permission. Because I think this is important.
This is about failure.
I’ve never dealt well with failure. In university, the first time I ever failed an exam, it resulted in a near-hysterical crying jag because I was certain my academic career was over and I was completely without worth as a human being. I am not someone who fails with grace.
This is about divorce.
Last week, on August 26, a judge granted Mike and I a divorce. This will come as a surprise to pretty much everyone, because we chose to not talk about it publicly until everything was finalized. A lot of that was because, in our opinion, our relationship and its workings (or not-workings) were no one’s business but ours. We decided together to get married, and we decided together to end that marriage. But I think a lot of it was also because the word divorce carries a lot of highly dramatic emotional baggage.
I think nearly everyone in America knows someone who’s been touched by a really horrible divorce. Growing up, I had a lot of friends with divorced parents, in a myriad of different arrangements. And there’s also the image of divorce in the media, where it’s largely this dramatic thing that involves screaming arguments, and crying, and throwing dishes, and trying desperately to hurt someone else over stuff.
The specter of failure was what made things the most difficult as Mike and I talked and talked and ultimately came to the conclusion that this chapter of our lives was at an end. I kept thinking over and over, that because I couldn’t find a way to fix this, to fix me, I had not only failed myself, I had failed our friends, our families, and worst of all, I had failed Mike, who is still my best friend in the world.
I haven’t failed Mike. Mike didn’t fail me. And I don’t want to hear anyone characterizing our relationship, our marriage, our divorce, that way. There is this is this societal meme that deems divorce a failure of marriage, a failure of a relationship. As if finding someone compatible with you, who will grow and change as you grow and change and always maintain that same compatibility, is a simple and easy prospect that defaults in success. As if finding a single person who can ceaselessly put up with your shit (and the shit they have to put up with grows and changes too) and still love you just as much until one of you dies is the norm.
Maybe divorce sometimes is about failure. But I don’t think that’s the only potential meaning. It can also be just about ending. Failure is only one way of a multitude for something to end. And if I’d allowed myself to think about it that way, this process might have been a little less agonizing.
Mike and I have taken care of each other and supported each other through a lot of good times and bad times.We’ve shared our lives. But the thing about life is that it changes you, inevitably. The day you stop changing is truly the day you’ve ceased to live, even if you don’t get around to dying for a while after. And for nearly a decade, the changes life wrought on us kept us on the same path, and it was good.
You don’t really have control over how life is going to work that magic on you. And at some point we stopped growing together and started growing apart. That’s not anyone’s fault. That’s life. Mike isn’t the same person I married four years ago, let alone the same person I started dating five years before that. I’m not the same person he married. And if you gave it to us to do over again today, we’d say thanks, but no. But let’s have some cake anyway. Cake’s always good.
We’re not a failure. Our relationship is not a failure. Because we made each other stronger, better people. We loved and supported each other through thick and thin until we reached a place in our lives where we couldn’t support each other in that same way any more. It’s time to continue loving and supporting each other in a different way.
And you know what? That’s okay. We walked along the same path for close to ten years. But now it’s time for those paths to diverge.
When I think of it that way, in terms of the fullness of our lives and the way’s we’ve grown, I can’t really call our relationship, our marriage anything but a success. We are both greater, stronger people than we were when we started. And if it’s going to end, then let it end. Holding on to something that is no longer supporting either of us would be the real failure.
There are a lot of people in the world. A lot of people. I feel lucky every time I meet someone with whom I can connect on an intimate level of any kind. Maybe there is someone (heck, ten someones, fifty, one hundred!) who will by some miracle of statistics be that perfect one for me, who will always match me and be matched by me. I don’t know if I will ever meet that person, and I won’t know if I’ve met them until I’m on my deathbed. And that’s okay.
I am incredibly lucky to have met Mike. We have been best friends for nearly ten years now, and for a bit less than that we were more. Mike has been an amazing, integral part of my journey to where I stand now. He has made me who I am today. And he has had the courageous soul and boundless generosity of spirit necessary to keep cheering me along on my own path, just as I’ve been cheering him along on his. Even as those paths have taken us farther and farther apart.
We haven’t failed. Because wherever we end up, we will still love each other.
Recently, I was majorly disappointed. This is because I am a human being who lives in the real world.
When I experienced this latest disappointment, I indulged myself in about thirty seconds of high-pitched, anger and self-pity-filled, internal screaming. Then I took a deep breath and said out loud, so I had to hear it: “Well, this isn’t about you.” And then I made myself let it go so I could focus on what came next.
My housemate watched this minor drama as it unfolded and said she’s never seen anyone else deal like that. Is it that unusual? I don’t know that many people, and haven’t been around most of them when they’re having a crap day.
But hey, maybe it’s worth talking about.
Disappointment sucks. No shit, it sucks. It feels terrible. It’s a massive let down, excitement and happiness and expectation going from mach 1 to hitting a brick wall. Instant stop and total annihilation. It’s a low, awful, destructive feeling. But you know what? It’s part of life. To be blunt, it’s a major part of life.
We live in a complex world full of forces and people who are completely outside of our control. Neither the world, nor the people who populate it, exist to make us happy or make us feel good about ourselves, let alone give us what we want. So when something good we’re hoping for happens, that’s awesome. But the chance of that is just as random as something shitty and disappointing happening.
One of the things I find most comforting about the universe is that it is quite literally incapable of caring about us. If something shitty and disappointing happens, there is no malice behind it, no messed up biblical judgment. Sometimes things just happen the way they happen. And even when it involves people, I’d argue the disappointments caused by actual malicious intent are pretty rare1. People aren’t [normally] out to get you. It’s just the way they’re working things out doesn’t quite jive with what you wanted. So with that in mind, who is there to get mad or upset at, when something disappointing happens? Unless you know that someone screwed you over just to be an asshole, there is no place to direct your anger.
And maybe it’s different for other people, but for me anger without direction has always been self-destructive. It turns inward and gnaws on my heart like a wolf. It turns me into someone I don’t like.
I don’t know if I’ve had a better education in disappointment than most. I don’t think I had a particularly disappointing childhood. Maybe I’ve had a bit more experience with the sensation in recent years, since I started selling my writing. Because as a friend recently pointed out, art and disappointment are like peanut butter and jelly. You spend so much time hearing “no” that you come to expect it. Maybe that’s the shift. Maybe I’ve switched over to expecting to be disappointed, so I’m pleasantly surprised when I’m not.
But I don’t think that’s quite it. I’m not natively a pessimist. The more important lesson of disappointment is there is always life afterwards. And there is life immediately afterwards. The world does not pause on its axis, because the world does not care how badly your heart has just been broken. You still have to get up and go to work and feed the cats and interact with other human beings. Who may be sympathetic, if you’re lucky, but there’s a very set limit to how much wallowing in upset anyone is willing to hear out.
This is why, by the way, I think parents who try to shield their children from disappointment probably aren’t doing them any favors. When you’re five years old and don’t get what you want, you can get away with having a screaming meltdown, and you get the chance to then learn that when it’s all over, nothing has changed and now you feel physically awful too. A screaming meltdown is a much less acceptable response when you’re 30 years old, no matter how good you think it would feel at the time. The world will still be the same once you’re done crying, but you’ll have embarrassed yourself and probably gotten snot all over your nice shirt.
The real lesson I’ve taken from disappointment is this: You will never be able to control who and what will disappoint you, when it will happen, and how much it will hurt. The only things in the world you have any control over at all is how you deal with it and what you do next.
Which is hard. I’m not claiming it’s easy. Letting go of pain and anger and upset is never easy. If you’re incredibly lucky, maybe you can take that disappointment and make it into something greater. Maybe you can say fuck you, I know my art is worth something and turn it into determination. Maybe you can say fuck you, this isn’t how the world should be and go out there and start working for change. Maybe you can say fuck you, this is only tearing me down, and cut loose a toxic relationship. Maybe you can say fuck you, you tried to destroy me, and now I’m going to build something bigger and better and I hope you choke on it.
But those kind of disappointments? I think they’re pretty rare, to be honest.
I’m not here to preach lemons into lemonade crap, because frankly a lot of the lemons life hands you aren’t so much lemons as leaky bags of radioactive dog shit and there is nothing good to be made from them. But there is still life after, and it’s up to you to decide what to do about it. Are you going to give up on your art? Are you going to lay in bed for two days and not move? Are you going to hold onto that anger and lash out at anyone you think might be to blame? Are you going to poison your next project? Are you going to break things for the sheer pleasure of hearing them smash?
What you choose to do must be more important than the pain you currently feel. Disappointment sucks. But disappointment is also a teacher. And sometimes it teaches us more about ourselves than we ever wanted to know.
Ultimately, this is the best solution I’ve ever found: You take a deep breath. You let it out slowly. You say, “Well, that sucks. But it’s not personal.” Maybe if it’s been a particularly big disappointment, you have yourself a good cry, then go out to your favorite Tex Mex place and have disappointment fajitas and a margarita.
Then you get on with your goddamn life, because what the hell else are you going to do?
1 – Though obviously here, depending on the situation at hand we need to acknowledge the existence of institutional bias and prejudice, etc. That’s not really what I’m talking about here, but I feel it’s important to note that these are things that exist, and while not necessarily consciously malicious, will act in much the same way.
Okay, I’m going to talk about weight loss stuff. If you find that kind of talk triggering our you just couldn’t give less of a shit, please skip this. I just feel like I have to be open about this stuff because it helps my peace if mind.
You probably already know I’m in the midst of an ongoing fitness/weight loss/help me I don’t want to get type 2 diabetes project. The summary is I used to weigh 275 lbs, now I weigh around 192. Which is actually less than I weighed when I started power lifting in high school. So I think the project has been a resounding success, but I’ve tried to keep it rolling since this isn’t the sort of thing you just stop doing.
For about the last year, my weight has basically stayed steady, though I’ve had some nice strength gains since I started weightlifting again. I did all my weight loss with calorie counting, which has worked well for me. I generally eat 1400-1700 calories per day, which is appropriate to my weight and activity level…if I want to keep losing weight.
Which I haven’t been.
So a bit ago I got frustrated and decided to try cutting my intake further to see if I could get my weight to start dropping again. A nutritionist I talked to a couple years ago had recommended trying that. I went down to 1000-1300 calories per day. Which peeled another ten pounds off of me before I got stuck again. And then I started having dizzy spells, stopped gaining muscle strength, and lost a giant whack out of my aerobic endurance.
Plus that was just a fucking miserable amount of food to be restricted to, to be honest. I looked at it and thought I can’t maintain this, I don’t want to, I feel terrible, what’s the point if you feel terrible?
Which comes back to something I’ve always said about losing weight…you have to be able to sustain whatever changes you make in your life. This shit isn’t something you just do for a couple of months and then decide it’s good enough. You have to even out at a place where you’re happy and can do it long term. Life is short. Eat the fucking cake.
So I went back to my old intake. As one might expect, I regained the last ten pounds with almost frightening speed. But now I’m back to gaining strength and I can once more run/ride for an hour or more and not feel like total shit, so I count that as worth it.
Yet all the calculations I did kept telling me hey, at 1400-1700 you should be losing weight. So I went ahead and made an appointment with a new doctor who specializes in weight management. Because why not, what’s the worst that could happen? A doctor could tell me I’m fat and need to eat less and make me feel like shit. Been there, done that.
Long lead up on this story I know. But I feel like I hit the jackpot.
This new doctor asked me about my physical activity and what I normally eat. She asked me about my family history, if I had thyroid problems, etc. And this is what just blew me away when all was said and done. She told me:
“We’re going to try a few things, like analyzing your BMR and body fat. But I need you to be at peace with where you are since you are already healthy. Genetics are a big part of this, and I need you to have a realistic goal and be okay with it.”
If you’ve never been the fat kid, then you have no idea how it felt to hear that. It was like a fucking choir of angels singing from heaven. (And she loved my joke that, well, that sucks, but in the pre-modern world I would have been set.)
Because this is the shit you get, even from doctors a lot of the time, this idea that you should be able to hit a certain weight on the scale that correlates nicely with your height, and if you haven’t it’s because you aren’t trying hard enough. Entire fucking industries are built on this lie that if you don’t look like a film star, it is your own fault, and it’s entirely within your power to change that…if you just buy into their product.
Well, that’s not the way it works. And just hearing a doctor tell me for once that she wanted me to be realistic and be okay with myself almost made me cry. That never happens. You tell yourself constantly that you’re are okay the way you are, that this is just how you’re put together. But having someone else confirm it for you feels like pure magic being injected into your heart.
I wish I could bottle this woman and send her to every chubby kid (and grownup with an inner chubby kid) in the world. Sometimes there isn’t anything you can do, and you have to be okay with that. You have to be happy with you.
Now the hard part is, as always, going to be hearing her beautiful voice over the constant background drone that says I just don’t want it enough.
Yeah, well you know, when I was a kid I wanted to be a unicorn too.
