23 things to do when you are sad

The Graduate.

Lou Emma B

The written word is one that I have tried to avoid. As someone who graduated only a week ago I can’t help but feel like I have spent the past three years being judged on my ability to construct and situate words within a sentence. Conveying my conjectures and opinions suddenly feels like a task, as if I’m still trying to appease a variety of sagacious academics. When in fact, I now have no one on hand to read my attempts at articulation.

I have over 100 draft posts saved onto this blog, a blog that I daily wistfully think about. Yet every time my cursor hovers over the gorgeously rectangular “publish” button something inside me makes me stop. I begin to question and doubt myself. Who am I writing for? Why am I writing? Who would be interested in this? I become unhappy with word choices and variations. Suddenly…

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Through it all, there was a dog

The Trailhead

Seven years ago, when my first marriage of fifteen years unexpectedly went belly up, I was involuntarily launched on what Joseph Campbell calls the Hero’s Journey. There are other names for this kind of experience. The writer Elizabeth Lesser calls it the Phoenix Process. Dante called it “the dark woods.” Whatever you call it, it’s a time of upheaval, pain, and eventually, transformation.  And to be sure, the year I spent ending my marriage and recovering – perhaps from the marriage as much as the divorce – was one of the most powerful and potent of my life. I still look back on it with a sense of respect and awe.

What I didn’t understand for a long time, though, was that the year of my divorce was only the beginning of a much longer voyage. Life had a great deal more in store for me than merely the end of…

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