Hillary’s story
By Hillary Livingston
It arrived in the mail the day before Thanksgiving alongside the water bill and an assortment of Black Friday ads.
I knew it was coming. I was expecting it. I was looking forward to its arrival. But, when I opened my divorce decree with slightly shaking hands and a deep breath stuck in my chest, I felt…numb.
Healing isn’t linear. It follows its own path. The things you expect to gut you sometimes don’t. But, then there’s the seemingly little things, like a coffee mug that sparks a memory that can knock you off course for the day.
My journey to getting divorced was so many things. It was unexpected to say the least. I was 7 months pregnant when we filed our papers in the courthouse. It felt surreal. It honestly felt like my marriage had slipped through my fingers. But, underneath all that grief and pain, there was a faint sliver of hope.
Throughout the course of my marriage, I slowly started losing pieces of myself and my identity. It happened so subtly. I thought I was compromising to keep the peace. I thought that sacrificing my own needs and wants was okay because I was doing it for my family. By the time I became pregnant with our second child, I had reached a point where the spark inside me that made me, me was so dim I could barely remember that it existed at all.
There’s so much else to my divorce story. There are a lot of moments and things that happened that still feel unreal. They were awful and cruel, and I am still healing from parts of it. But, I am so grateful to be where I am in this moment.
My life now is the most authentic it has ever been. I know myself better and love myself more than I ever have. Doing the work to understand and embrace who I am and how I want to live is the best thing I could have ever done for my children. They now know the me that has the capacity to do the most good in the world. I can give them the best of my love, support and guidance, so that they can grow up to be the best versions of themselves too.
Divorce is awful, but divorce is also wonderful. That’s a tricky thing to understand and it takes a lot of time and self-reflection to get to a place where the two things can co-exist at the same time. It was one of the hardest lessons for me.
The coffee mug and its memory no longer send me down a rabbit hole of grief. There’s a feeling of sadness, but there’s also a feeling of gratitude. I am the person I most want to be right now because I was at one point the lowest version of myself. Divorce helped me understand that.
My wish in sharing a snippet of my journey is that it instills a spark of hope in those who are still figuring things out and getting through the worst parts of it. Connecting with others and sharing parts of ourselves that can encourage growth and love is, in my opinion, one of the best things we can do as humans. Without divorce, I wouldn’t be able to offer this. And that is the narrative that I choose to embrace.