Divided Minds: Notes on Truth

I’m still so mad at her.

My ex-wife.
Thirteen years.

13 years with the one I thought was my partner.
13 years with the person I thought was my friend.
13 years of arguments. 13 years of smiles, inside jokes, and shared history—gone.
13 years of addictions. 13 years of recoveries.
13 years of faith in her. 13 years of disappointment.

I stayed faithful and she didn’t.

She slowed down and I couldn’t.

I got clean and she kept going.

13 years ended without a word – who is this master of avoidance I loved for so long? Who is this tyrant of faithlessness?

Who is it that’s left me here?

WHO DID I MARRY???

Crawling, bloodied, alone—into the desert at 40.

When I overdosed, it was the scariest moment of my life.

I remember the room. The weight in my chest. The sense that something irreversible was happening.

“Baby, can you hold my hand?”
“Baby, are you going to call an ambulance?”

“I can’t even look at you,” she said, disgusted.

There was a pause after that. A kind of silence thick with finality.

I shook and rocked, crying. Something in me broke.

I had always suspected it, but in that moment, I stopped believing the lie that I was loved.

She never called that ambulance.

“That’s not how love responds to death,” my therapist gently told me.

She’s right. It’s not.

I know now why I fall in love with people who remind me of my abusers.

It’s because I didn’t believe I was worthy of my own agency, health, or happiness.

I chose people who kept me “in check,” whose boundaries I respected more than my own.
People who thought for me.
People who required control over me and quietly reinforced the belief that I wasn’t capable of defining myself.

That wasn’t an accident.
That was alignment.

But I am worthy of it.

I am worthy of my own mind.
I am worthy of my gifts and abilities.
I am worthy of love, grace, intimacy, balance, and sobriety.

I am worthy of recovery.

Since I’ve been away from you, everything has changed.

The attachment withdrawal was brutal—worse than any drug withdrawal I’ve experienced. Each day still has its own weight.

But something else kept showing up alongside the pain.

I felt lighter.

Not all at once. Not cleanly. But noticeably.

I didn’t have to live under the weight of her “love” anymore.

The compulsive draw to relapse dropped to something manageable.
Self-respect—something I hadn’t trusted in years—started to show up again.

And then the thoughts came.

“What if I got clean for myself?”
“What if I actually try this time, no matter what?”
“What if I have to stop and she doesn’t?”

…and then the one that scared me the most:

“What if I actually want to live?”

I have to begrudgingly thank her.

Not for what she gave—but for what was finally revealed when everything fell apart.

Every action she took stripped the mask away.

What was underneath wasn’t pretty. It was bitter. It was brutal.

But it was true.

I’m still angry.

But for the first time, I’m not confused.

I have found the One who knows me.

I have found the One who builds towers from such sands.
I have found my north—my compass, my hope, my water in this wasteland.

And for the first time in a long time, I’m not trying to survive someone else’s version of me.

I’m still in the desert.

One day I will leave.