Episode 88: Time Is On My Side

Episode 88: Time Is On My Side

Excerpts from "The Petty Chronicles" every Monday

My divorce decree was signed, sealed and delivered several years ago. But despite what the paperwork said, understanding what it really meant to be divorced took much longer than I had thought it would.

At first, I didn’t know what to feel. I was pissed-off, hurt, resentful, scared and elated all at once, and this heady mix of emotions had a way of popping in and out at will like the seven Faces of Eve or Sybil’s many personalities on a really bad hair day. It was crazy making, to say the least but having no experience in being a divorcee or a woman suffering from severe personality disorder, I went with the maelstrom that ruled those first weeks and months post-divorce. Honestly, it was all I could do to hold on to my sanity for dear life and hope that time would take care of the rest.

Eventually I began rebuilding myself into a reasonable facsimile of the woman I had been before the fall, but learning how to be single again is not an instant, just add water kind of thing. It takes more than a minute to win it; you have to let things simmer for a while. Waiting for this New You Stew to come together is not easy, let me tell you, and I seriously doubted I would ever think of myself as single again. As a matter of fact, after a couple of years I began to think that the woman formerly known as married me, this unsettled version of myself, would always reign supreme.

But then one day like a bolt from the blue it hit me: I was free. Free of the past, free of the cocoon I had been living in for what seemed like forever and free of the comparisons I drew between my old life and the new one on a daily basis. It was pretty great. You know how runners break through the wall of exhaustion at the end of a marathon and are able to cross the finish line? Well, this was just like that except that rather than a wall, I felt like I had broken through a shower curtain.

If I were accepting an award for coming back to myself I would have to thank time above all else for making it happen. It certainly had nothing to do with my having patience because I had very little. And it had little to do with having faith because, to tell you the truth, I quit believing I would come back to myself the way I have. But as the Rolling Stones once said, time is on my side, yes it is. Of course, I had to wait and see but the unimaginable has happened; I’ve come running back to me.

Check out new episodes of The Petty Chronicles every Monday.

Click the following to learn about The Petty Chronicles and its author, Rachel Gladstone