GEOGRAPHICAL HEALING

I moved myself across the country recently – left everything familiar to begin life anew.  After 18 years together, my husband and I got divorced.  It sounds so cliché, but we seemed to be growing in different directions.  Even though we were two peas in a pod for most of our relationship, we began to want different kinds of lives. Leaving the safety and comfort of our home together to begin life as a single person is the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and I still don’t know that I’m fully over it.  I’m still in the healing process.

How do you heal from that kind of loss?  How do you lose your home, your foundation, your sense of family and keep moving forward?  In a country where divorce is rampant, people do it every day, of course.  I guess everyone goes about it differently, but for many, a serious change of course is necessary in order to heal when they lose a love that anchored them to the earth.  I think I fall into this category.

For me, remaining in the town where my husband and I shared a home together was antithetical to healing.  I couldn’t bear to drive by the restaurants we frequented or the places we used to walk hand in hand on sunny days.  I’d tear up shopping at our supermarket alone; it flattened me when I’d pass him on the road, waving sadly as he drove by, knowing that the one who was the center of my universe for most of my adult life lived 10 minutes away but would no longer be coming home to me.

I felt stuck, like I couldn’t move forward with my life unless I physically moved away from all the reminders of what I’d lost.  So I took a leap of faith, packed up my things, and headed west.  I was hoping that geography might help me break from the past.

I’ve been in my new life about a year now.  I still talk to my husband regularly (we didn’t part angrily), and I still ruminate over what I lost.  Distance hasn’t magically healed the hole in my life, nor did I expect that it would.  But it has offered me the hope of a new beginning, and I don’t know if that would have been possible to the same degree if I’d stayed planted where I was.

There’s something to be said for a new climate with new sights, new smells, and new people.  I still have to do the inner work of letting go and forgiving myself, but something as simple as geographical distance itself might be giving me a better shot at becoming whole again.  Small steps, but I’m grateful for them.

Portland is the host and executive producer of “What’s the Alternative?”, which airs daily on Veria TV (8 AM PST/11 AM ESTweekdays * 6 AM PST/9 AM ESTweekends *  8 PM PST/11 PM ESTnightly on DISH, FiOS, and Frontier): http://www.veria.com/whats-the-alternative.html

She also writes a blog for Veria:  www.veria.com/portland-helmich-blog.html and her website is www.portlandhelmich.com.