You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

Trungpa writes about torma and don. “Possession” is the closest translation for the Tibetan word don—a ghost that causes misfortune, anger, fear, sickness. When you have a don, you are the possession.

The anger possesses—owns—you. Torma means “offering cake.” You offer the torma to your don. You feed the ghost that does you harm, “that which possesses you.” Giving it a little something sweet is a way of saying, Thank

you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt eno...

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that yo...

Fear isn’t inside me, I’m inside it. Anger isn’t something I’m holding; it’s something that’s held me, possessed me. And being possessed is

the opposite of being free. By the time you’re reading this sentence, I want to have let go, to have wrestled myself free of this ghost, to have forgiven. I want to be able to say, Thank you, pain, for being my teacher.

I feel this so deeply.

Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.

Maybe this is a story of two human beings who committed to each other very young and didn’t survive one another’s changes.

Betrayal is neat because it preempts me from having to look, really look, at my marriage.

Mind blowing and so, so true.

If you feel that someone is being unkind or unfair

to you, you don’t want to be close to them. Then you aren’t close to them, so you grow further apart. More unkindness, more distance. It’s a vicious ...

I’m trying to retrace my steps, to follow the bread-crumb trail back to before, back to when I believe he loved me and was proud of me, back to when I believe we were happy.

One day, it hit me: The best things to

happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage. And then, this: But the best things remain.

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.

Deep

—Maggie Nelson

Do not be stilled by anger or grief. Burn them both

and use that fuel to keep moving. Look up at the clouds and tip your head way back so the roofs of the houses disappear. Keep moving.

I would have another marriage. I would be another wife. I would have other children. Yes, I know what I’m saying, but hear me out: I wouldn’t miss my children, because they never would

have existed! I never would have chosen to put my children—the ones who exist, the ones I love and can’t imagine life without—through this—

YES!

—I know because I’ve been dragging my

old, married name around for more than a year—on my social security card, on my bank accounts, on my driver’s license, on my tax return, on my credit card, on my checks, on my mail. I know because my marriage is gone—weighs nothing—but

its shadow weigh...

His tone of voice was cold and critical. I knew that tone of voice.

I know this too, and it still hurts after all these years.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Beautiful

This is something I grieve: the severed tie to someone who knew me since college, the cokeeper of our memories, the

Same

person who could tell my kids what I was like during those years, the person who could tell me what I was like, the person I shared my life with. All of it, disposable.

Same and so heartbreaking!

Do those memories warp without their mirrors, without someone to reflect them, to keep them true, to show them their twin? Do our separate memories grow on their own into two different things, unrecognizable to one another? Do we?

Sometimes I wonder: Who would they have been without the divorce, the pandemic, the move?

My children too, I often wonder. I am angry they didn't get the chance to become who they would have been.

What tenderness

might be alive in them? What trust, what optimism, what confidence? All wax and f...

So much innocence lost.

During our first session she talked about the contracts we have with others. In every relationship, she said, there are the things that connect us—things we have in common, things we like about each other. But the contract is like a secret handshake under the table. It’s subconscious. It often has to do with the wounds we carry with us from childhood, our attachments, our traumas, even the ones we haven’t articulated to ourselves.

“For the contract to be broken, finished, both parties have to heal their wounds,” she said.

“You’re whole and strong,” she said. “You have very clear boundaries. You’ve outgrown the contract. You’re done with it. But now you have to weather him coming to that, too. It could take years.”

It could take forever. It could never happen. This unknown is unbearable.

“You’ve got a ghost that follows you around all day,” she said. I know what you’re thinking, but no—the ghost wasn’t him, it was me. She said I was being haunted by the part of me who couldn’t set this down.

I feel that ghost.

Caroline said what I was doing was like tugging on a rope: I pulled, and there was tension on the other side. The only way to stop the tug-of-war was to let go of the rope. I needed to put the rope down.

I thought of it more like stepping out of the pile of sh*t.

The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.

So deep, so true

“He was so loved, not just by you but

by all of us. He had a whole family of people who loved him, really loved him—me, your dad, your sisters, their husbands, the grandparents and aunts and uncles. He had all of us. All of us.” “I know, Mom,” I said quietly. I did know.

This is the ripple effect people don't know about, people don't think about, just how many people you have hurt by your actions. It hurts me to know I brought him into all of our lives not only to hurt me but to hurt them. My Dad was so distraught, "He lied to me!" He was thinking of his own broken heart. He lied to me too, Dad, he lied to the kids, my family, his family, all our friends, he lied to all of us. He broke all our hearts. This still guts me to this day.

Later she’d tell me on the phone that we were the last couple she would have expected to divorce. That we

seemed meant to be together, perfect for each other.

This was us too! No one could believe it. How could we all have been so fooled?

I understand now why people physically cut up wedding photos and family photos. Because you want to preserve the part you love and remove—excise, surgically—the part you don’t.

This sucks so much! Putting away all the pictures buries all the memories. The good memories still hurt too badly.

Or, rather, the part that hurts you.

YES!

There are pieces of him hidden like little landm...

I replaced what I had to when he moved out, and I’ve

continued to replace what I can afford to, bit by bit: new bed, new mattress, new dining table and chairs, new dining cabinets, new bookshelves, new coffee tables, new art on the walls. When I finally bought a new couch, a yellow midcentury modern

This is another piece people don't understand until they go through it. The mattress you shared, that was the first to go for me. His indent in the mattress was gut wrenching every time I crawled into bed. It had to go.

The only way I can live in this house is if it’s my house. Our house. The only way I can remain is if I change it.

Same. I had to change as much as I could, to make it my own house. To make it no longer "our" house. To attempt to erase those memories. Every wall painted. All new decor.

I still eat off the wedding registry dishes, almost all of them chipped now, with the wedding

registry silverware. I still drink from the highball glasses and champagne flutes we ...

I do too, those were things I picked out, I loved. He didn't care.