Why?

Reader's Digest version of what has been going on with me:  I am getting a divorce from the woman I thought I would spend the rest of my life with.  This is a blog about what I've gone and am still going through as I transition from married to single.  I'm assuming this isn't an original idea and I know lots of people go through divorce every day, so why should anyone read this?  Why am I even writing it?  Why? Why?  Why?  Sigh.  I'm really sick of that word.

The question of “Why?” has come up so many times over the past few months that it became maddening to me.  I'm sure part of the reason it got that way was because I never had a good answer for it.  

“Why did this happen?”

“Why didn’t she talk to me about it?”

“Why didn’t I see it coming?”

“Why did we both let it get this far?”

"Why is Iceland green and Greenland mostly ice?"

All very tough questions to which I still don’t have answers.

But let’s start out with the easy one I asked earlier:  Why am I writing this blog?  There are actually a couple of reasons:

1)     Therapy - I think by writing this blog it will help me focus my feelings and note some observations about the transition from being wedded to being un-wedded.   I’ll be up front:  Divorce was not what I wanted and if I could go back in time and correct the things I did wrong in hopes it would prevent me from having to write this blog, I would do it in a nano-second. 

The problem (other than the government still hasn’t released their time travel capabilities to sell at the local Wal-Mart) is that as much as I didn't want the divorce to happen, it had to happen.  I won’t write one article on the all reasons why but I’ll try to touch on them from blog to blog.  I do want to stress that this isn't a blog about placing blame.  I think there's enough of that to go around.  It's trying to figure out where I went left when I should have gone right and talking about things in the world of being single that I haven't talked about in years. 

To be honest, I’ve tried to put all the pieces of this thing together but it's a million piece puzzle where all the shapes are the same and the colors are shades of gray.   I’ll never complete it.

As the great Don Henley once sang (and you’ll hear me quote him quite often within these paragraphs): 

“There’s three sides to every story, baby

There’s yours and there’s mine and the cold, hard truth.”

I will probably never know the cold, hard truth and honestly, I don’t think I still even know all of her side, so all I really have is my side. 

Yeah.  I’ve got some issues I need to tend to and I think this may be a great way to wrassle a few of them.

2)     Tapping my creative side – I used to be more creative and do things like write or make videos or even do a little cartooning.  Somewhere along the way I lost that and maybe that had something to do with what ultimately led to my wife no longer loving me like she did.

I’m not sure where I lost it or what I was doing when it fell out of my back pocket but I can only imagine I was working at the time.  For the past two years, my life was more about my job than it was about me, my wife or my two daughters.  I would come up for air every now and then, notice it, and ask my wife if I should do something about it.  I was always told no, it was fine so I went back down into the depths.   Not that I blame my wife for that.  I should have just listened to myself and fixed it rather than waiting for her to tell me to fix it.  I finally did take steps to repair what I could and I felt things improved, but it was just too late.

So, I’m hoping by using this keyboard for something other than programming business process workflows (yeah, I have a nerd job), I’ll get back that creative part of me I used to enjoy quite a bit.

Even if no one ever reads this, it will help me to know it’s out here.  I’ll know that at least I tried to get on digitial paper what has been buzzing heavily around my head for the last several months and maybe it will get me to write about things other than the divorce and being single again. 

That’s the hope, at least, but before we can get there, let’s get some of this current stuff off my chest.  Considering the sensitivity of a subject like divorce and the raw pain it causes, the question still remains,  why am I writing this?   Outside of what I stated above, there is also a real simple answer.

Why not?

Next time:  Making social media work for you