Exile or freedom?Leaving my husband with nothing but the clothes on my back and a few precious things - leaving a 3 floor house and a huge income to very little money and a small cracker box with unregulated heat and cold - has been harder and more devasting than I imagined. Though he had the affairs - I feel like I'm the one being punished - and he acts like I deserve everything that is happening to me.
I swing between so many feelings, anger, rage, despair, acceptance, joy, determination, - till my body just wore out and I have spen a week in bed sleeping day in night with high blook sugars and a major kidney infection and a sense of isolation so profound - a belief, maybe excerbated by the ill health - that I shouldn't cll anyone or speak to anyone ever again but should just keep to myself because I was just too damaged and disruptive because of my pain and my pain and anger leaked out even when I was trying to be polite in public and I just should stay away.
It felt like Exile. It felt like being isolated like some kind of toxic substance.
But then y whole life I've waited for a time like this - a time when noone called or cared what I was up to all day and my life was thinned down to the bare minimum - and all I had to concentrate on was getting my writing an school-work done and working on my art - letting the hidden part of me that noone else but me seemed to care about come out.
Noone stops by, noone calls, noone even knows when I leave the house or come home. I think the dog and I could get in the car and take trips to Quitique or other places I've loved and noone would even know I've gone.
All these rather normal things I read about in the books I've loved that the rest of my family found strange - except for my children - I could just go do and noone would be the wiser. I could train buddy to get used to riding with me in the car all the time - and get him used to staying right by my side when he goes with me - because frankly, he feels like he is in exile, too.
I have to remember all the famous solitary women I wanted to emulate. Georgia O'Keefe, Willa Cather, Annie Dillard, . . .
They say middle age is when women come into their own - maybe because all of a sudden we are invisible so noone notices what we are doing because they think our jobs are over?
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