Annie and I have finished up our volunteer work and are now traveling with a group to different islands. We usually have long rides to and from places. Sometimes when i’ve been exhausted enough sleep has come easily, but mostly trying to sleep is a joke. It’s fun though, I get to spend a lot of time talking to people, reading, writing whatever. To pass the time on our last ride I went through my laptop to delete old files, as traveling has quickly filled up my memory.
I started from the beginning, which included files from when I was married. My ex had downloaded his voice notes on my computer, which I was happy about because it included the conversations we had with the surgeons after Jon Gabriel was born.
But in the voice notes I came across some recordings of a few fights we had been in. I hadn’t known I was being recorded at the time but looking back i’m grateful I was.
When it became clear my marriage was going to end, I considered deleting all the photos/videos/everything except the Jon Gabriel time period, but I couldn’t get myself to completely erase all of it. Divorce was the right decision for the both of us, but the first few months after were really lonely and I occasionally found myself needing to go back through old files and journal entries, as reminders that it was indeed the best option.
I read a book recently on how the brain processes the trauma of divorce and how it affects one’s mental and emotional wellbeing. It talked about divorce being similar to the death of a spouse in that the brain registers it as a loss, but it is harder to process because your brain fills in the holes with love for that person. Your consistently torn between knowing and forgetting why divorce was the best option. It's not them you miss, but the stability and identification that came with marriage. It's a dangerous road of thinking, one that can lead to a lot of darkness if you let it.
Fast forward 2 years and just a few days ago, I was sitting in an english meditation class at the Wat Mattarat temple in Bangkok.
During the class the monk talked about buddhist beliefs and that the goal in buddhism is to achieve ultimate freedom. That meditation allows your soul to let go of the worries and negativities of the mind and body, to release anything that doesn’t feel like freedom.
So there I sat on the train, trying to clear my hard drive by going through 2 years worth of memories from my married life. A 2 year period that, while no one person is to blame for this, felt so much like the opposite of freedom.
I thought about how not only were those 2 years flooding my hard drive, but unknowingly, they had been taking up other spaces in my life as well. Preventing my ability to fully embrace newer, fresher memories and experiences from taking place.
With the old memories came a flood of old emotions. All at once, I wished I could go back and tell my younger self that everything was actually going to work out. That freedom was on it’s way.
Not freedom from marriage itself. Not the freedom to “be single”. Being single has it's own set of drawbacks.
But instead, the freedom to grow toward authenticity and happiness. For both of us.
Freedom from opinions. Opinions of people who have no idea.
Freedom from blame. From feeling the need to make one person the villain and the other the hero, in order for divorce to be a reasonable decision.
Freedom to view that time period as nothing more than two people doing the best they could with the tools they were given.
Freedom from a God or from people who would view it as anything but that.
Freedom to make choices based on expectations of myself rather then expectations of others.
Freedom to forgive, myself and others. To free myself from the past to create room for the future.
And as I sat on the bus at 2 AM going through the old memories, I thought about what that monk had said.
I had a million reasons why I thought holding onto the old pictures/memories might be useful. That it might help me remember what went wrong to avoid future heartache, or that it would be nice to be able to look back and see how far i’d come etc.
“On your journey toward awakening,” he said, “Follow whatever path leads to greater freedom. Free yourself from all physical, mental, and emotional attachments and you will free yourself from suffering.”
And with that, I deleted nearly every file from April 2012-July 2014.
It as it turns out, this freed up more than just my hard drive.
And you guys, i'll be on a plane home in 2 days.
I knew i'd gain a lot from my time here in Thailand, I never anticipated how much I would let go in the process.
