I’m turning 34 on Monday.  This will technically put me in my “mid-thirties”.  This is the time in your life when you have everything figured out, you are settled into your career, you have solid relationships and maybe kids, you’ve got everything under control in the game of life.  And what I am here to say is that this is a crock of shit.  This doesn’t mean these things don’t exist.  They do.  Factually, they may have a name such as “wife” or “mom” or “experienced” but this in no way means that everything is made clear or precise.  Some things grow clear over time while others, in the process of becoming clear, actually become foggy.

I can say with absolute certainty certain things.  For my journey leading up to this point I did everything backwards.  Maybe it’s because I’m an old soul.  Maybe it’s because I was a desperate, naïve fool as a teenager and for me and my journey a large percentage of my life would inadvertently come from this place.  If you know me now you will know how much I champion things:  champion women to throw out the dated notions of princess and rescuing; throw out society’s stranglehold on how much to weigh and how to behave; throw out the needy dependency on anything other than your own fabulous light that every female walking Earth is graced with. I am independent and do things on my own.  But I wasn’t born thinking like this. 

I may initially have been born with a champion spirit.  One of the first memories I have is when I was 3 years old and my dad and mom were fighting in their bedroom and my dad slapped her leg, a silly slap really, but it made my mother (who was already crying) cry harder.  They in their emotional fighting had not noticed me standing next to the bed, watching.  But when he slapped my mother and made her cry even harder I screamed at him, “Don’t you ever hit my mommy!” and then I went and ran and hid behind the door in my bedroom, thinking I would get in trouble.  But by the time life happened and I was a teenager I was very different.  My voice was choked.  I was looking for my Prince.  I was broken and needed rescuing after years of stuff happening.  And I found him.  At the age of 17 years old (just like in the Beatles-turned-Tiffany song I worshipped).  He was angst ridden, wickedly intelligent and witty.  He was a nerdy technology geek who could do anything with a computer.  He could draw like Escher.  After we started dating he drew an Escher-like mural that our art teacher at our high school was so proud of that he hung it up in the main lobby of the school for everybody to see all year long.  He had named his magnum opus “The Heather” after me.  We would spend hours together lying in my bedroom making out (never having sex) and just talking about life and he helping me to deal with my demons, while tucking my hair behind my ear while I slept with dried tears on my face.  We did this the night of our senior prom when his final Marine Corps physical in Dallas prevented us from going to the dance.  He told me that after I fell asleep he stayed up all night watching over me.  We grew closer and closer.  Spring was upon us and graduating was pending.  We were about to be launched into the world.

New bands and new music were common bonds we shared.  He was leaving for the Marine Corps 3 days after we graduated high school.  The thought of losing my Prince was unfathomable to me.  At the burger joint where we worked near graduation time he played me a CD of a new band he had found.  It had a song on it he wanted me to hear.  It was “Shimmer” by Fuel.  He told me that he knew we would have to break up because he would be in California and I would be in college in Texas.  It had been my dream to go to Texas A&M and be an Aggie.  I decided I would give up this dream.  I was going to do everything I could not to lose the Prince I had so desperately clung to.  We wrote love letters all summer that he was in boot camp.  He signed all of them “Your Prince”.  I signed mine “Your Princess”. “Shimmer” was released as a single that summer.  I turned the radio off every time it came on.  Rather, we picked out a song to be ‘our song’.  It was “I’ll Be” by Edwin McCain.  Less than a year later we eloped. 

From the age of 19 until 26 I lived a very secluded lifestyle with this man that was very simple.  My husband was an introvert that did not enjoy people so we stayed home most of the time.  We did not drink alcohol.  We did everything any All American introverted, young, nerdy couple would do.  We watched TV shows, we watched super hero movies, we watched comedians on TV, we listened to podcasts together, we blogged together (at one point having our own joint blog with a small but growing fan base of bloggers), we went to the park and rode our bikes.  I read books while he played on his computer.  We played video games and board games together.  We played Magic: The Gathering for hours on end.  He always won all games against me except for Trivial Pursuit which I always won.  I took care of the mundane stuff like paying bills and he took care of lifestyle functions like keeping the car cleaned and keeping all of our myriad of technological equipment up to date.  We never traveled.  We only ate at chain restaurants.  We did everything together at all times.  We did not socialize with other couples.  Besides some of the trainings and deployments while he was in the Marines for the 1st four years of our relationship we were never, ever apart. 

But it was a façade.  Yes, we created life together for almost a decade.  But it was built on false pretenses.  I could not let him go when he needed to be let go way back when our senior year of high school.  We had even had a pact that if we were still single by the time we hit 28 (we were 5 months apart in age) we would get married.  He was my Prince, my rock, my everything.  I had been conditioned to believe that this Was It.  What every woman was looking for.  Somebody to complete them.  And this is what he did for me in the beginning.  He took my hands in his hands and gazed into my eyes and told me to let him take care of everything “angel”.  So I gave myself up for him, and from this teenage point began weaving an identity joined with this person since he was my mate. My penguin. For life. 

Only it went sour from nearly the beginning.  As soon as we moved into our military housing on the Marine Corps base he began to get moody and distant.  He would hack into all my emails and accounts online and keep track of everything I did without telling me.  He would laugh at me, and sneer.  He would threaten to kill me at times with the K-bar he slept with under his pillow.  But then there were other times when he would wake up from a deep sleep and wake me up, and still in a sleep trance he would tell me how much he loved me and I would cling to those moments and push the bad ones aside that happened when we were awake.  Even awake, the good moments were always in pieces, framed around something that wasn’t quite right.  But I had to hang on to something that reminded me of what I believed to be real so I hung on to what I could get which was the pieces.  This was The Dream.  I did this for years, sacrificing myself as a woman, pushing my intuition away that was screaming at me and telling me these things weren’t right, and this wasn’t right and that I needed to let go.  But I couldn’t let go.  It was several things that girls can commonly fall into:  1.  They are keeping the dream of the Prince alive (their “other half”).  2.  Their identity has become woven with this man in that desperate place they believe to be true love and they become walking, breathing carbon-copies of the man  3.  Though secretly their intuition is telling them one thing they push it aside to sacrifice themselves, believing in the Dream and that their love is enough to save and heal the situation.

I was finally strong enough to leave the situation at 26 when I became so numb that I couldn’t feel anymore.  My life had become a burned out shell of broken dreams because I had been trying to carry a very heavy burden that eventually got the best of me.   And I had to do the hardest thing I had ever done which was to go forth and forge my own identity at a time in life when the rest of my peers had already grown up and long done the thing I still had to do.  This in itself was painful, but having to own a new identify of myself being alone was the hardest part because he had been at my side for so long, no matter how shitty and ‘not right’ it had become.  We had history and history is haunting.  These past 8 years of being alone I have had to learn how to get rid of the ghost of a partner that I was so wrapped up with, and do it all by myself, and create the Heather without the man attached.

This new singleton adventure hasn’t been without its bumps. I started traveling the United States for work doing ‘storm chasing’ which was the opposite lifestyle of the introverted, secluded marriage I had been a part of for so long.  I traveled outside of work.  I made new friends.  I made mistakes.  I took risks that did not pay off and some that did.  My sweet, naïve nature made me an easy target in the brutal single world.  I was raped at a party a year after my divorce when I was first learning how to drink alcohol after somebody put roofies in my drink.   I wrote love poetry for different guys that would never love me back the same way.  I built a house in a new city.  I bought land in Belize. 

A few years after my divorce my now ex-husband and I were having a candid conversation about our marriage and he confessed something to me:  that he never wanted to get married when we did and that rather he married me so that he could get out of the overcrowded Marine Corps barracks and into base housing that was only available if you were married.  He was sorry about that.  I was stunned.  Even though it was long over I couldn’t believe that my marriage had been based on a lie.  I had worked so hard for so many years devoting myself to something that did not exist.  And this lie, from the actual marriage vow exchange to my championing of the Dream Of the Prince existed on many levels.  A couple of years later he re-married and he texted me saying he was exchanging wedding vows that day and did I have any words of wisdom?  I texted back “Yes, just mean it.”

The quest for truth vs fiction is a huge part of life in general.  This is an important element of the journey of living as life is built upon assumptions and identities and we do the best that we can with what we know and with what we believe the other person agrees with.  Within that is our capacity to be who we are (or aren’t).  Entering year 34 I have been single now for the same length of time as I was married.  I needed this.  I have been living my own truth now for several years, and the bookends between woman vs girl are stark.  Not that I have everything figured out because I don’t.  Not that there is one right or wrong answer because there isn’t.  Not that I will do things perfectly or without vulnerability or mistakes like some superhero because I won’t. 

This is one of the most important realizations in truth vs fiction, in life vs the comic books.  That is that life is messy so you can’t take a perfectionistic blade to it.  And the lines are blurred.  You have to always strike a balance and take the good with the bad.  But there are definitely better ways to do things than others.  As a woman taking a stand for yourself first and foremost rather than self sacrificing towards something external is one of the greatest benefits you can supply to yourself and the planet.  As a woman there is a much better (and easier) way to conduct yourself when you walk in your light and can tear your eyes away from the things that separate you from this like the quest for finding The One, the numbers on a scale, or trying to weave an identify with the person you constantly find yourself propping up against.  And in my opinion this is the greatest force on the planet when allowed to shine from its appropriate state.  From this place you can partner up and walk life on an entirely different level because the platform for everything in life starts with the women of the world just like life itself.  I’ve walked both sides of the path, and if there is one thing I can say with certainty at this point going into year 34 it is that when unleashed this shining force for women may not be perfect but it is surely unstoppable.  Great things are going to come from this as we evolve.