Читать книгу The Gap Year(s) - Nathy Gaffney - Страница 8

There are three sides to every story: your side, my side, and the truth. And no one is lying.” (Robert Evans – American Film Producer)

For a while after my marriage ended, I carried stories with me to keep me safe. Safe in the knowledge (or belief) that my exhusband was a difficult person. Stories like him being negative, passive-aggressive, and insensitive, and that his personality and character flaws really were the primary drivers that broke our relationship and marriage.

If you’ve ever come to the end of a relationship where pain, regret, anger, and resentment are your bedfellows once your partner has departed, you’ll undoubtedly have a wide selection of stories that you will have curated, polished, and perfected (or, hell, even created!) that best illustrate and sum up just why your ex was such a bastard, loser, cheater, control freak, narcissist, bitch… (choose any one, or a combo, or feel free to insert your own descriptors here).

For me, these ‘stories’ were a vital part of my recovery. They helped me channel my emotions, especially the negative ones. Emotions are just energy in motion. They move us. Whether it’s forward or backward or just spinning and whirling in space, it takes energy to create them and keep them alive. And believe me, I was fuelled up and ready to blast off… but was I headed in the right direction?

Because here’s the thing… I’d been there before. This was not the first marriage I had lived to see the end of.

I’d been married once before, while I was living in London in the early 90s.

It was my bad boy phase. A fairly typical start to the tale. Aussie girl heads to London looking for adventure. Sound familiar? Aussie girl beds down firmly in London’s party and club scene, and comes up for air about four years later. Still sound familiar? I spiced up my version of the story by falling in love with and marrying a loveable rogue. With his connections to the London underworld and having fallen foul of the law in his younger years, he had excitement written all over him, and I was up for the adventure.

Leroy’s and my brief marriage was like the journey of Icarus and his wax wings – not designed to fly, but like Icarus, we threw caution to the wind and ran off the edge of the cliff anyway. Fuelled by a diet of youthful exuberance, drugs, alcohol, and partying, we spent most of our short married life pursuing assorted chemical and emotional highs. And like our mythical muse Icarus, we flew and danced through the sky, ignoring the danger signs (and the fact that we weren’t actually birds). By the time we got too close to the sun and our wings melted, the catapult back to earth was as unavoidable as it was speedy and definitive.

The highs gave way to lows, and after I found out that he had strayed, I hit terra firma with a resounding thwack! Emotions cascaded through me like my own Victoria Falls, crushing, twisting, and tumbling my internal world into pulp. They rendered me helpless. I became a victim to them and to the story they created.

A few months after our split, the weekend before I left London to return home to Australia, friends dragged me to an outdoor festival. Gay Pride is London’s annual street and dance party festival, where straight and gay Londoners alike take to the streets and South London’s Brockwell Park to celebrate and party hard.

It was a glorious English summer weekend, the kind where the sun actually shines and everyone strips to the legal minimum amount of clothing; Londoners bare their skin and lap up the generosity of the sun’s warmth. Across the gently rolling grounds, hands waved in the air like a field of daisies dancing in a breeze to the rhythm of thumping dance music. As the crowd of 30,000 revellers frolicked in the sunshine, I turned around to come faceto-face with… my ex.

Clouds gathered and blocked the sun. To this day, I can’t tell you whether he saw me or not. It seemed to me that he looked right at me, right through me, but it was so fleeting. As quick as he was there, he was gone, swallowed by the throng.

The crowd surged around us like waves, moving us both on, but I was rooted to the spot in a frozen panic. I couldn’t find a rock to hide under fast enough. I didn’t know where to turn or what to do. I wandered around in a dither, bleating to anybody who would listen about how my ex’s presence at this (very public and free to attend by anybody) festival had completely stumped me, and was crushing my ability to enjoy my last weekend in London.

This went on for about an hour until, as I was whining to one of my best friends – who has always had an incredible capacity to cut through the crap – she turned to me and, gripping me by the shoulders, looked directly into my eyes, shouting in decibels to be heard above the thumping techno.

“Nath!”

She shook me firmly.

“He doesn’t love you anymore, but I do. So, I’m gonna give you one piece of advice.”

I waited.

“Get angry and stay angry.”

With that, she turned and disappeared into the heaving throng of sweaty, shirtless bodies, leaving me to dance with my own demons. I stood open-mouthed for a minute, choking on the bitter pill of brutal honesty she’d just shoved down my throat. She was right, of course. He just didn’t love me anymore.

Our marriage was over, and it had ended badly. He had strayed. I was hurt, I was sad, and yes, I was angry. I was also giving him all the power. As soon as I had seen him, I’d handed him the reins to my emotions (not that he’d asked for them), leaving myself flailing in his wake.

What a waste. Of time, of energy, and of my last weekend with my friends.

But Kieran showed me the way out: to harness those emotions for my own good. At the time, her counsel to “get angry and stay angry” gave me the impetus to move forward. And I was angry… very angry! (Not any more though. Time has healed old wounds and we are great mates!)

Back then however, whether or not the motivator for moving forward was to move forward to something off in the distance or ‘away’ from him is immaterial. It was more about the anger building a fire in my belly, and momentum to propel me out of the pain. It enabled me to think about a future, my future. And what I was going to do with it when I got home. I strapped on a big pair of ‘fuck you and the horse you rode in on’ boots and stomped off towards my future.

But that was a long time ago…

And now, 27 years later, Kieran’s advice came flooding back to me.

Here I was, devastated after another broken marriage. Should I get angry?

20-something Nathy thrived on anger. It was a powerful motivator. That ‘fuck you, I’ll show you!’ attitude.

Certainly, I needed some sort of internal driver to propel me through what would be a challenging time, but this time anger didn’t seem to fit the bill. Despair put its hand up, but I quickly shut that shit down.

I came up with this one instead: hope. This time, it would be hope.

At 47, I found myself with a young son, no (regular) job, and no money, but rather than despair and anger, I was filled with something else – an absolute determination to make the rest of my life a joyful, authentic, loveand laughter-filled, meaningful existence, whatever the hell that was going to look like.

Looking at this through another lens, it might have read:

“My life is shit as it is. I’m miserable, my kid is miserable, and the man I’ve tried to make a life with is miserable. How much worse can being on my own possibly be?”

My Grandma Eileen had a saying… “You’re a long time looking at the lid.”

This was her go-to when she wanted to convey the potential cost of putting off making the tough decisions in life – like following your heart, or your dreams or your gut. Google Translate might interpret this as: “Life is short, so don’t bloody waste it!”

Sure, I knew there would be some tough times ahead, but right then, with the taste of possibility whetting my appetite, life was looking up. If there were fuck-ups, they would be my fuck-ups, and if there were victories, they would be my victories.

I was back in the driver’s seat.