To understand THE RISE, you must also understand THE FALL.
Normally, I’m pretty articulate. I love words. When you find the right ones, they allow you to communicate even the most complex thoughts and feelings. I love the @breneebrowns series on @hbo, “Atlas of the Heart.” She talks about the language of the human experience in depth. I feel this type of knowledge should be taught from a young age, the same way we learn math and English. It should be mandatory.
When it comes to that chapter of my life, the life after my ex left me, I still find my language blocked. I think in part because I blacked out (and blocked out) most of it. I also ask myself, how do you talk about it without sounding like a victim?
More recently, I’m intimately aware of my marriage with my husband, Charlie; it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, so how do I talk about that part of my life without making it feel like I’m unhappy today or minimizing this remarkable man? So here’s the thing: both things can be true. The chapter where my ex-husband of almost 8 years and 14 years of life together left me was pure anguish. I didn’t think I’d survive that but by the grace of God, I’m no longer in a place of grief that you feel in your bones, and that’s the beautiful truth.
My best friend Danny sent me a Lex Fridman podcast recently, he interviews divorce attorney James Sexton on marriage, relationships, sex and more (episode #396) I listened to all 3 hours, 30 minutes and 16 seconds intently (twice) and took notes.
“That years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute.” Edgar Allen Poe
No one has summed up the experience of my divorce more eloquently. For almost 14 years of my life, I loved a man who didn’t love me the same way. The language of that distinction is SO important. There was love, yes, but our individual experiences of it were so vastly different that I couldn’t comprehend his choice to end it. From age 19 to 31, all that love and life were replaced by bitterness, resentment, anger…, and hatred. Hatred is not something you hold on to; you have to release it, or it will consume you. It will eat away at you from the inside out. But good ole’ Edgar knew what he was talking about when he said that. He captured the fragility of love and the power of betrayal.
To understand the rise, you must understand the fall. It wasn’t one decision that led me to this part of my life. It was a million little choices, wrong ones, right ones, necessary ones, that led me to create Hafsa and Co. To be able to choose love again, to say “no thank you” to corporate America and learn what it means to be an entrepreneur, to say goodbye to friendships that do not serve me, to end relationships, to break in all the places a person could so that a transformation could take place. To have faith that this was God’s plan for me all along - even though I doubted Him daily and sometimes still do.
The photo on the left (below) was taken a month after he left me, I was 30 pounds lighter, on antidepressants, I couldn’t sleep without medication and I felt like I was rotting from the inside out. The photo on the right, a “transformation”, my life here and now. Proof that life is worth living and that life is so, so beautiful. I start there with you. I share the journey from my perspective and my experience. If you don’t want to read it, I understand—# unfollow. For those of you who’ve asked me to bare my soul, thank you for allowing me to be brave.
xo H
