Standing in the Light
On the grief and loss I have been protecting instead of feeling.
Hi, Hello, Friends! 🤓
I lost the feeling that there was someone in the world who knew the deepest parts of me and was supposed to stay.
I am losing the person who once felt like my safest place.
I am losing the life where I believed we were going to grow old together.
I lost the feeling that there was someone in the world who saw me completely and chose me anyway.
My marriage ending is bigger than that.
I am losing my husband. Not just the marriage relationship.
I am losing the man who understood the language of my heart before everything broke. I lost the shared emotional world I believed we had together.
I lost the person that I thought felt like home.
I have written Thirty-Two essays since August 1, 2025.
My husband has not appeared in a single one by name.
I have called him my husband. I have implied him. I have written carefully around him the way you walk around something broken on the floor in the dark, knowing it is there, not looking directly at it.
I have written about attachment styles and nervous system patterns and the ways love can become survival. I have written about capacity and exposure therapy and learning to ask for help from someone who wasn’t him.
I have protected his absence more carefully than I have protected my own grief.
I have been writing around this for a long time. Mostly because I was afraid. Mostly because I didn’t know how. Mostly because some ancient part of me still believed that if I stayed quiet enough, careful enough, hidden enough, he might still come back.
That our marriage might still be saveable if I just didn’t say the true thing out loud.
That is not me fully authentically writing. That is me shrinking. And I have been doing it in the one space that was supposed to be entirely mine.
It has taken me time to be able to name what my fears are.
I fear that someone will read this. That he, my husband will read this.
That if I write the true thing, I will be failing at protecting him and our marriage. Even though the marriage has been abandoned.
I have been afraid that if I speak my truth, he won’t love me. That he won’t come back. That the silence will harden into something permanent.
I have been afraid of disappointing my husband. Even now. Even here. Even after everything that has happened. Even after the grief, pain, and loss.
I have gone through so many moments in the last 12 months, alone. I have had multiples procedures under general anesthesia, biopsies, and treatments this year and what hurt most was not those things. It was, he was not there. I also couldn’t tell him I was hurt, because he gives me the silent treatment around anything not surface level.
I called it capacity building. I called it practicing trust in a new way. And all of that was true.
But underneath it was also just this: I missed my husband. I wanted him there. I felt like I needed him. And he wasn’t. And every-time he wasn’t, it felt as if something in my core cracked.
I have written about my bonus son and daughter and said I still miss them and still love them without ever fully writing any deeper about missing then or him. Because missing any of them felt like the most dangerous thing to say. Like it would cost me something I couldn’t afford to lose.
The silence will remain no matter how perfectly I mold and shrink myself into being. No amount of quiet enough, careful enough, hidden enough, perfect enough will make him come back and choose me. I cannot heal a marriage alone. I cannot force someone to show up when they say they will. I cannot force someone to stop going silent. I cannot earn something from someone who has already left.
The punishment I was afraid of has already happened.
My husband has already abandoned our marriage.
Our marriage as it WAS, has ended.
And still I have been protecting him in my writing. Still performing the silence he forces without ever having to ask for it. Still choosing him over myself in the one place I swore I would not do.
My Substack is my space.
I wrote about rules I learned and how I wanted to rewrite those rules in an earlier Substack:
Old Rule: Love stays no matter what. Even if it costs your safety.
That was the old rule. The one given to me in childhood. The one I carried into every relationship that followed.
I rewrote it. I wrote:
Love without safety isn’t love. That is captivity.
I wrote that. I believed it. And then I kept protecting the person who made me unsafe in the very space where I was supposed to be free.
I am not writing this to hurt him. I am writing this because I am setting myself free.
I am standing in the light.
And I am standing in the light because I love him, but I love me more.
Love doesn’t turn off just because a marriage ends.
You can both love and grieve someone deeply and still be the one who had to leave. That you can miss the person and know the relationship as it was is not safe for your mind. That both of those things can be true at the same time without one canceling the other out.
I am writing this because I am done disappointing myself.
Every time I have shrunk in this space. Every time I have chosen his comfort over my truth. Every time I have written around the grief instead of through it. That is me choosing him over me. And I have been doing it long enough.
I lost my husband.
I lost the person who felt like home.
I lost the shared life I believed we were building.
And I am allowed to say that. Out loud. In my own space. With my own name on it.
The grief is real. The love was real. The loss is real. None of that requires his permission to exist.
I am standing in the light.
Standing in the truth of this is one of the hardest things I have written.
My nervous system knows it.
My body knows it.
Some ancient part of me is already bracing for the punishment that speaking truth always used to bring.
I am here now. And I am not going anywhere.
I am not my past.
I am the story.
I choose to keep writing.
💌 Thank you for meeting me here, friends!
A la Luna, 🌙
Lauren 🪻🍀
I have been working on a creative little project over at [freckledlore.com]
She is a work-in-progress just like I am. I hope to meet you there. 🤓