FACEBOOK: 29 Years Ago Today? You Got Married!

 

“You never really get closure, do you?…
The idea that the creative impulse is a way to get rid of poison…
or a kind of creative defecation…no, they don’t teach that in college…”
– Stephen King, HOLLY

 

DISCLAIMER: Before you start reading this, please know that writing of it was fucking exhausting, I almost quit 34 times (I counted), it took half of  a week to complete, I lost my nerve a fair number times (I didn’t count) and I had at least 100 voices telling me that I should just shut the fuck up…the last of which was what made me keep forging onward.
END OF DISCLAIMER.

SEPTEMBER 10th, 2023

So, just a few moments ago, I realized that today would have been my 29th wedding anniversary and, if I’m being honest, it low-key gave me pause.

How could it not?
Twenty Nine years ago, I got married.
Huh.

For anyone who does not know me, I am NOT married anymore.
I’ve officially NOT been married for about four years…but in my heart, I’ve been solo for about seven years, starting on the day my ex started cheating (ECHO: cheatingcheatingcheating).
Yup, I get to choose my date of solo-ness…and it was a wonderful discovery that I have the power to CHOOSE.

Choice is a delicious thing.

In the last five years, I’ve really AND thrillingly AND with great thoughtfulness AND hard work, taken my life back…back?
I wanna say “back” but my life has changed SO much, I wanna use a word or say something that does not infer that my life is anywhere near the same as it was…so, I will say INSTEAD that in the last five years I’ve worked incredibly hard to mindfully grab and hold onto the reins of my life, making purposeful decisions that go in specific directions instead of sitting around, WAITING for great things to happen.

Every time I make a move towards the above goal, it’s my own powerful choice.

Choice can be a delicious and learned thing.

Choice is, of course, also a double edged sword.

Sometimes when you make the choice to do something purposefully, things can go horribly wrong…you can get your heart broken, your can physically hurt yourself, you can end up in a pickle…but, all that being said, I’m learning that taking a chance and making a choice to do SOMETHING, instead of doing NOTHING and rolling with the lazy river of life, has great rewards and puts you into the very thick of mindful living.

Speaking of living, almost fifty-five years ago, I was born.

It wasn’t my choice,  I honestly don’t even think it was in my parent’s plan, but I’m sure glad to be here.

The reason I started to write all of this is because the dates of my marriage-of-yore and my birthday are six days apart…which used to be cool and kinda fun, but honestly, post marriage, it’s now totally shite.

TOTAL TOTAL TOTAL SHITE. And no, obviously this calendar-fuckery would NOT be my choice.

For my whole LIFE I’ve always loved my birthday and now it’s all fucking tied up in memories of my old-news marriage and let me tell you WHY it’s so hard to shake the association.

FACEBOOK.

FUCKING FACEBOOK.

FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING FACEBOOK.

For the last two years, I’d joyfully forgotten about the marriage-of-yore day UNTIL the old faithful fucking FACEBOOK MEMORIES function rolled its Wheel-of-Chaos my way, like that fucking rock-of-death in the old-school Indiana Jones, making an UNSOLICITED reel of my old-news, didn’t-end-particularly-well marriage.

You just never fucking know with FACEBOOK MEMORIES, am I right?

(So many fucks being given…but I stand by them. Whooooo boy)

FACEBOOK MEMORIES might show you a wonderful day at the beach with friends, getting a bit sunkissed or a lot burned, drinking beach wine and/or jargaritas
OR INSTEAD
it might rolodex a shot of you and your ex-husband standing on a country bridge with your dog, looking down the barrel of the lens, commemorating your 23rd wedding anniversary…though the difference is NOW you’re fully aware that jargaritas in the sun make you next level drunk AND that your ex husband was TOTALLY cheating on you at the time the bridge picture was snapped.

And that LAST discovery I mentioned still blows my mind and pisses me the fuck off.

Which further pisses me the fuck off.

Okay, maybe the realization that this date was, at one point, significant gave me more than low-key pause…I can admit that.

TODAY,  before I sent the shot to the FACEBOOK netherlands where it can languish till next year I guess (I’ve tried to delete it a number of times, but NO DICE, fucking FACEBOOK…some of my friends see it every year, WTF), I took a moment to enlarge each frame of the bridge picture on my phone to see if I could discern the weight of all the secrets in my ex-husband’s eyes.
But you know what? I could not.
Which blows my mind a bit more.

AND THEN I got ALL fucking frustrated because the FB MEMORIES function has managed to, AGAIN, successfully dislodge this whole line of thought…my birthday, the old anniversary, why are the dates so fucking close together, I hate that stupid shit happened, why did that stupid shit happen, who is that guy anyway…AND NOW I’m all fucking fussed up about things that don’t matter anymore, which takes up precious space in my brain, using VERY precious energy from my spirit.

And as a very interesting gentleman (a really good kisser, BTW) I see when I’m in Los Angeles said when I asked him if he enjoys musicals, Ed Sheeran or calamari, NO BUENO.

NO FUCKING BUENO.

So, I write.

Writing is one of my most powerful mindfulness tools.
It’s wild that writing about the past helps stand me firmly in my present.

TWO THINGS ARE TRUE AT ONCE.

Me to Me, “Why not be all the way healed, Sharron?”
Me back to Me, “Ma’am, fuck off…fucking fuck off…okay, let me get my computer. Fuuuuccckkkk me.”

So, I wrote.

Today, that friggen aforementioned FACEBOOK MEMORY bridge picture cascaded out of my gut and into my typing fingers like a fucked-up waterfall, changing itself into a REAL BRAIN memory of the day my ex was clearing out his shit from my soon-to-be solo residence, and he texted to ask me if I wanted him to take our wedding album and get rid of it.

Girl.

It was not even a year after the implosion.

The question took my breath away.

No. No.
Leave it.
Just leave it.

On that day, in that moment, I was not ready to let go of all that the book represented…and I hated that he asked…and I HATED that I said no.
Just fucking hated it.
Like, just go. Get out. Please. Exit.

And he, well…I imagine that anyone who has a secret side relationship for TWO years…for two years…breathe THAT IN….has already let an album like that go…would maybe like to erase it, right?

But I’m so glad I kept it, because less than a year later, I burned that wedding album on the Summer Solstice…like a fucking delightful witch, you guys.
It was thrilling.
It was cathartic.
It was nothing.
It was ALL those things combined.

I watched all the pictures edges catch flame, then watched them turn into smoke, then watched the smoke go up and up into the stars.
It was poetic.
I don’t think I even cried.

I stood alone in my backyard, in a pandemical world, sweating my ass off in the 32 degree heat, wearing a tank top, shorts, and knee high rubber boots with sports socks,  drinking very expensive scotch, watching my past turn into ashes and disappear.

AND let me say this with volume, that I EVER felt the need, or found myself in a situation IN WHICH the best balm was to eviscerate whole books of pictures of my life is still something that I will probably never be able to forgive. What a haunting.

My sister once said to me that being betrayed can feel like the loneliest, longest, silent, most frustrating thing in the world.
She was not wrong.

It’s very odd to see the face of someone you spent almost half your life with, that you knew from the time you were sixteen, catch on fire over and over again…and as you watched them burn, realizing that maybe you didn’t know them at all.

Okay.

With my EVER important fifty-fifth birthday looming…
…a birthday I’m shoehorning into the place of my fiftieth, fifty-first and fifty-second, which were all utter emotional shit-on-toast on so many levels, no matter how hard my friends and I tried to make them otherwise…
…I FUCKING REFUSE to let this possibly magnificent birthday happen in the shadow of FUCKING FACEBOOK MEMORIES that open the door to discoveries, angry-things and thoughts about the past that have FAR outlived themselves.

So, in the style of my wedding album bonfire, I am gonna give air to a few things that I wish I’d said or written about over the last five years.

I know, right? Just a few.

They’re NOT the HUGE and lay-down-for-a-couple-of-days type things that happened…and there were a lot of those…but bite-sized excruciating things that have occurred to me since the implosion, that I’ve let live in my head rent free…and their time for eviction has arrived.

Also, that I’ve had the occasion to categorize my excruciating things by power of discomfort and decimation is also the total shits…but time is a shockingly good healer…as is therapy, am I right? I will give MYSELF an AMEN on that.

Okay….I WILL ALSO admit I’m kinda excited to put these things all in one place.

I’m gonna write them down here and then imagine them burning and floating on air up into the sky…bleed them and let them do their very best to become sweet, sweet nothing.

I’m going to claim the thirsty want to have someone else read and know about the following things, instead of letting them collect dust and bitterness in my brain attic.

I wonder if it will work?

I’ve picked my top four.

I let go of the day I flew to visit him where he was working and found a phone charger already plugged into the place beside our bed where I usually plugged MY phone charger AND by the end of our heated and weird discussion about said phantom phone charger and why was it there, I was convinced that I’d lost my mind and that I somehow owned two chargers. Girl.

I let go of the day I breathtakingly realized that this woman he cheated with had probably met and spent time with my precious dog Buckingham, while riding in MY car, while I was away working. This thought gutted me for a while. 

I let go of the moment a friend of mine told me that my ex brought his mistress to the theatre company watering-hole…while I was back in Ontario shooting. He introduced her to everyone as a friend, and while most found it suspect, no one told me till that moment…which was about four years later. I mean. 

I let go of the video that popped up on my phone via the APPLE FAMILY SHARE function…almost as dangerous as FACEBOOK MEMORIES…of a women I’d never seen teaching a NFLD accent to (insert friend-who-is-not-a-friend-anymore’s name here) for an audition. When I asked him about it…and this was a year before I found out anything…he told me he’d enlisted the help of a gal he’d met to aid our friend in her musical audition. Then about a year after the end, I found the video on my phone again…and crashingly realized it was his mistress. Okay, THAT one…was lie down worthy. 

Well. Burn, baby, Burn.

LEAVE. EXIT. JUST GO. THERE is the fucking door, Mind-Garbage.

There are indeed many more moments…little flashes of indignities that come back to me unexpectedly…usually surrounding social media.
It’s one of the reasons that I CHOOSE to barely go on FACEBOOK anymore.

FACEBOOK’S a true minefield for all the humans in the world trying their very fucking best to move on and/or heal from old-news marriages, relationships, broken friendships, pets who’ve gone to their greater reward, and people who’ve left this mortal coil.

But let me tell you this, I would never have posted or written any of this before this year…AND healing is a long-ass process that serves up gut-check moments.

AND I choose to believe that as the years go by?
The pictures, the memories, the unexpected arrows, will continue to fuss me less and less…as I make the choice to look at them, mentally set them on fire and watch them flame out into the stars.

Choice is a delicious and learned thing.

You know what is not delicious or learned?

Fucking Facebook.

BUT FIFTY-FIVE!!!

THIS ONES GONNA BE A FUCKING GOOD ONE!

I FUCKING CHOOSE IT!

S.M.
Toronto, On
September 12th, 2023

* As always, thank you for reading. If you feel this? Please pass it on. If you REALLY feel this? Hit the subscribe button. I publish the post and then promote them a day later…so you will get them first!

S xo