Yoga

We were asked to share something in yoga in our journals that was a very rough, emotionally breaking time in our lives and how forgiveness and compassion took a part of it and I thought I would share with everyone what I wrote. 

Looking back now, I can say I was so dumb for getting married to young AND mom was totally right (but don't tell her I said that!).  Sam and I started dating when I was 20 and not even 2 years later we were married.  We rushed into it because he had just joined the navy and we both needed the extra cash and I needed to be able to contact him while he was out without problems.  Through the deployments and realizations that we really didn't know each other as well as we thought we did, things changed very fast.

I remember a lot of fighting.  It's very hard for me to remember any of the good times together, and there were a few but not many, because all we did was fight towards the end.  I couldn't sleep and I was emotionally eating.  And I put back all of the weight I had originally lost on WW plus 10-20 lbs.  I would say I gained about 50lbs.  Then we decided to separate and I moved back home to Pennsylvania while he stayed in Virginia.  I was still a ball of nerves and not sleeping and our relationship never got any better, but I don't think we even tried to make it work.  I filed for divorce in February the year after we separated.  He was already engaged to be married after he finished a deployment again.  Our divorce was finalized in July of that year.  I was 25 years old and already divorced.  How did this happen?

I'm not really sure there was any compassion that helped me though any of this.  I did forgive him and also forgave myself.  Everyone makes mistakes and this just so happened to be a large mistake for both of us but we can't dwell on that forever.  I didn't want to be in an unhappy relationship for the rest of my life.  I'm sure he didn't either.

I coped with this by talking about it with my friends and family.  Sam and I have no contact, we don't talk about anything and we have no mutual friends so it makes it a lot easier to forgive and forget and it's better this way.  Last week while on vacation with a friend, she turned around and said to me "this isn't how I expected my life to turn out at all."  I said "yea, I didn't expect to be a 25 year old divorcee either and this isn't how I expected my life either.  But after everything that has happened, I can't imagine it being any better than this right now."  Both of us have an education, a great family for support, awesome friends, good jobs, she has a healthy child and we both have very amazing supportive men in our lives.

I think the life I have now is how I actually ended up being able to cope so well with everything I've been through and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

-Ginny