A Wider Horizon

The eyes experience less stress when they can look upon a wider horizon.
— R.D. Chin

I was sitting in a hotel ballroom in New York, looking into the eyes of a woman I had met ten minutes earlier, when she told me I had some energetic stuff in there.

We had been instructed to look into each other's eyes for two full minutes while the facilitator asked us to consider what this woman had been through, her disappointments, her challenges, her self-doubts. It was an exercise meant to help us see each other truly. I had picked my outfit for that weekend with the same care I once gave a board presentation, down to the earrings, because if nothing else, I was going to look like I had this handled. When the two minutes ended, the woman across from me said, "Wow. You've got some energetic stuff in there." I had a pretty good idea what she meant. I simply hadn't let myself look at it yet, or feel it. But something in me had already cracked, just slightly, like the first hairline in a shell.

It was July 2021. The streets were still empty most mornings because of the pandemic, and like a lot of people that year, I was walking them and taking a hard look at my life, my relationships, my career, what I actually wanted versus what I had simply been doing for years. On one of those walks, I decided, on a whim I still can't fully explain, to fly to New York and spend a weekend with a group of women I had never met, gathered under the banner of being "high vibe." I didn't know if I qualified. I didn't know a single person in that room.

What I did know, walking in, was how to look like I had everything under control. That was the only thing I'd been practicing for years. My father had died the year before, and I hadn't let myself grieve him properly, not with everything else that needed doing. My mother had just been diagnosed with uterine sarcoma, and I was the one managing her move out of her house, the sale of it, her doctors, and her fear of dying, while she was managing her fear of dying by controlling everything else around her. I was also still running a regional office for a national nonprofit, trying to lead other people through their own uncertain year while silently falling apart in mine.

If you had asked me how I was doing, I would have said fine. I was always fine. Fine had become less a description and more a performance, the thing a capable woman says so the people around her don't have to worry about her, even while she's the one doing all the worrying for everyone else.

By the last hour of that retreat, the leader called me up to the front of the room. I had held myself together the entire weekend, the way I had held myself together for most of that year. But I had been listening to woman after woman stand up and tell the truth about where she actually was, her frustrations, the limits she'd put on her own life, what she could no longer pretend was working in her marriage or her family or her own sense of herself. Something in me that had been cracking since that first eye contact exercise finally gave way. I stood in front of strangers and felt the floodgates open, and underneath all of it was one plain understanding. I wanted something in my life to change, and up until that moment, I had been trying to make it happen entirely on my own.

I have thought about that room often since, for what it taught me about what happens when you stop holding your own counsel and let yourself be seen by people doing the same hard work you are. The horizon doesn't actually get bigger. You just stop straining to carry the view alone. For months, I had been walking those empty streets, believing the questions in my head were mine to sit with by myself. In that room, surrounded by women asking versions of the same questions out loud, I understood I had never been the only one looking. I had simply never let myself be heard among the others who were also looking. The strain I had been carrying for so long was the strain of believing I was the only voice in it.

If you have spent years being the one who holds everything together, the one other people lean on, you already know the particular exhaustion of a held face. You also know how rare it is to sit in a room where you don't have to hold it.

That is the room I am building now. I call it The Threshold, a circle of women in every stage of divorce, whether you are still deciding, already in it, or years past it and just now catching your breath. It is a place to stop pretending you're fine, and wide enough to find out what's actually on the other side of that.