Good Kind of Lonesome

   I am making the observation that it is better to be honestly lonesome, than to be lonely while living with a someone whom you are truly invisible to. Having been married for sixteen years, of which the last ten were increasingly  disconnected, traumatic, and hopeless I was so starving for the freedom to be myself that I am only now getting to a point of saying hello to that familiar sense of loneliness in solitude. I am comfortable with this, as I have been here before. The difference I now note is that I no longer have the sense that it is something I have to "fix". It is more like a reality I simply accept and on reflection I so prefer an honest loneliness to having all my time dominated, controlled, and my vitality sucked out of me so that I felt numb a lot of the time as if on automatic pilot in a survival mode.
  I feel alone for sure, but I relish the time and freedom to think and express my self. There is a very faint glimmer within that wonders how it might feel to be in a healthy relationship. This surprises me, as when I first left I was so traumatized I felt that I was cured of romantic yearnings once and for all. I clearly felt my daughter's simplistic observation was correct, "you're good Mom but you don't choose very well" no shit?
   But in untangling and piecing together the threads of my "journey" (as my awesome therapist calls our life story) some surprising insights have shed light that has indeed been healing. It hasn't been without some pain and sorrow, but getting it out somehow is like letting go of so much invisible garbage. Little pieces suppressed beneath the surface that have been a chronic infection in my spirit and now they are being excised. It is such a relief. Not just because it helps me forgive myself for my many failures, but it gives me hope that I will not travel that road again. It is finished.
   Mostly I feel an intentional joy in my solitude. I accept my path. I don't feel the need for a man to complete me and yet, perhaps it is a sign of healing? I am not closed to the idea that some day just maybe I might know what it feels like to have a healthy relationship. I am leaving that one up to God to arrange or not.