With each passing day of my newly divorced life, I feel a bit more grounded, a bit more sane. I feel that I am getting closer to being the “me”, that I was so long ago, once more. And that’s a good thing, I know, and it takes time (boy, don’t I know!)

I am both relieved and very thankful that I can begin to see the sun behind the clouds now, because some days – some of my darkest days –  I honestly didn’t think it was possible. I felt dismembered and detached, like a distorted version of myself. I couldn’t remember who I was or had been. Ever. The past had been blurred by so much noise and deep pain that it was tough to recollect happier, lighter times.

But they are on the near horizon now, I can feel it.

Even with this new epiphany, I have to admit that I am still not the best version of the “me” that I once was not so very long ago. I’ve acquired some pretty disturbing habits, at least disturbing to me because I know that I was not like this before. Stress and heartache can mold and shape you into someone that you don’t even recognize, if it goes on long enough.

At one point, I will admit, I was probably relying on alcohol more than I should have. Not to a dangerous point of course, I wasn’t drinking everyday – at least not all day – just enough to blur the lines and put on the soft filter when it was all getting to be too much. Too hard. Too draining on my soul.

Did I really bring a margarita to baseball practice in my travel mug??

Now that phase has pretty much passed, thankfully. I don’t feel the need to escape my life the way I had before, and now I have so much more to focus on that is positive and brings me happiness. Stressful at times, but a good kind of stress this time, usually.

I had stopped exercising, stopped caring about how I ate, stopped caring about me. I was circling the drain more than a time or two, depression so deep that I would need a full-sized ladder to climb out of that hole some days, so sure that this would never end and that I would always feel this way.

Not certain about my future, scared, and disappointed in myself and life in general.

Normal? Sure, on some level. But when you’re going through it, normal is just a word that people use to shut you up. They want to look away and pretend that you are still “normal”, that you are still the same, but really you’re not.

One more habit to share, and if I’m honest, I think that I’ve overshared it quite a bit in the last couple of years, is my newly discovered world of profanity.

Yes, my word selection has grown exponentially since this all began, creatively and loudly too, I might add. I have uttered some swear words that in the past were completely off-limits. Words that are “those words”, you know the ones that even people who cuss regularly know that those are “the bad words nobody says”. Yes, I’ve not only uttered them, but I have screamed them, cried them, texted them, written them, sometimes stringing them together in a creatively descriptive way that I never knew existed.

Until I said it.

I was the mom that used “oh my goodness!” and “dang it” in front of my kids before this. I didn’t say my first swear word, out loud, until I was in eighth grade. I had finally had enough of the boy in the seat in front of me harassing me on a daily basis, my patience and my good manners had reached their limit. I eventually said “fuck you”, low and with meaningfully controlled anger, and oddly enough, he stopped.

The power of words.

Yes, I have cussed before, something that my ex showed incredible distaste for whenever I did. Not very “classy” I suppose. I readily admit that I am no angel when it comes to using foul language, but my boundaries disappeared this time around. They just dropped away, like the bumpers on a bowling lane – and suddenly I was serving up nothing but gutter balls!

And I didn’t care.

I stopped policing myself for the existing audience, for the most part. I do have some semblance of integrity and respect when I need to, even if it doesn’t appear so sometimes, so safe to say I held back in more public spaces. But overall, I stopped caring if it upset or offended someone. I didn’t care if people didn’t like it, if my kids heard it, or even if I spoke that way in front of my parents! Using swear words in front of or to my parents in conversation, slowly became normal. This was not normal for my family. The first time I said “fuck” during a conversation with my mom, and the ground didn’t crack open and swallow me – and she didn’t freak out about it – was when I realized that the dam had been released.

It just gave me more fuel, more permission to push the boundaries.

The thing is, I knew that I was doing something far out of character for myself but I didn’t want to stop. I couldn’t. I could not express the hurt, the anger, the devastation, the complete loss that I was experiencing without seasoning it with a few (or more) cuss words. I felt as if I had adult onset turrets sometimes, the words flying out of my mouth before I could edit them. I could not find the adjectives that would properly express my feelings, or describe the darkness that was always edging into my everyday life, without using profanity as a sentence enhancer.

It wasn’t pretty, but it was real.

Professionals say that there are five stages of grief. I disagree. I think that there are at least six or seven, if not more, that are just sub-levels of the main list. The one I’ve experienced most is “loss of control for emotional expression”. Or to sum it up in a one word description like the original list (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) let’s call it “profanity”.

It’s a broad description, but a fucking good one.

This happens somewhere either before anger or in-between anger and depression, before or after bargaining, or both, or all of the above. And the beauty of this stage? You get to repeat it as often as you like, because some days you just need to hang on to that ledge and scream your head off in a litany of profanity.

I am not proud of my behavior, I also do not intend to continue repeating this stage much longer, but I do accept it. And isn’t acceptance where we want to end up anyway?