The World Breaks Everyone

The World Breaks Everyone

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The World Breaks Everyone
The World Breaks Everyone
Still Here

Still Here

The Feminist Guide to Divorce

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Rio
May 15, 2025
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The World Breaks Everyone
The World Breaks Everyone
Still Here
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Dear friends,

I have to be honest - writing this today has been really hard. An old friend reconnected with me on instagram. The last time I spoke to her, we were both new moms breaking up with the fathers of our kids. She left LA and went home to New Zealand. Her American ex followed her, with her consent and agreement. They are now both married to new partners and co-parenting their child peacefully in New Zealand.

I’m still here.

Me in 2013

That friend - gone. That one? Gone. That one comes back once a year. Gone, gone, gone.

I know that when people ask me how I am, and I respond “Still stuck in LA. Still dealing with my ex” they roll their eyes and think, '“When will she get over this? It was a decade ago!”

Cheryl Strayed wrote once about saying goodbye to the ghost ships that never sailed. The opportunities that you didn’t take. The lovers you rejected. The ones who rejected you.

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

Our ghost ships did not sail because they were burned down. We were in a war without any rules or code. We were at once the target and the collateral damage. We are not just survivors: we are surviving, every day, often watching the butterfly effect destroy friendships and romantic interests and job opportunities and finances. We are never not mourning. We are always, always dealing with an impossible situation and watching in horror as we respond in less than ideal ways. Time is running out but we don’t have the power to make certain decisions. Important decisions. Life giving decisions. And it wears upon our body, our minds, our souls. There is so little dignity in this kind of pain.

I’m a half mom. My career stuttered, stalled and has ground to an aching halt as I try and survive in a city I don’t want to be in with absurdly high rent. I don’t get to choose where I live, where my son goes to school, when our vacations are, whether he is vaccinated or not. The scars of my experience are chronic anxiety, depression, the kind of self loathing that makes Sylvia Plath look content, loneliness and a deep, fearful suspicion of men. This experience has broken me, and I long for the day when I will be free. But I will never be free. Because even when my son is eighteen, I will have to choose between him, and the life I should have had all those years ago - if it even exists any more. If I choose my kid, I lose. If I don’t choose my kid, I lose.

This is my ‘still’. There is so much more in it. How my relationship with my family imploded under the stress. The friends I have lost. The jobs I fucked up. The endless fucking tears. The knowledge that you could not give your beautiful child what they deserve. Going to bed alone, waking up alone. Waiting for those moments with your child.

A social worker told me that once you feel unsafe with someone, you can never return to a place of total safety with that person.

We are destined to be trapped in this fearful uncertainty of ‘unsafe’ forever.

This is the reason I say “Still here.”

You have forgotten my pain. But I still need your grace.

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