You Learn to Live With It

THOUGHTS OUTSIDE THE OFFICE

Today, someone called me crying.

Not somebody I expected to hear cry. Not somebody I would ever have described as fragile. He is one of those people you mentally file under steady. Strong. Capable. The kind of person you assume will deal with whatever life throws at him and keep moving.

But today his wife told him she wanted a divorce, and suddenly none of that mattered.

He was devastated. He told me he would do anything to save his marriage. Change his life. Give things up. Do whatever it took if there were still some way to keep the person he loved from leaving.

At one point I told him, “I would cut off my left arm to have somebody feel about me the way you are talking about your wife right now.”

And I meant it.

There is something almost impossible to describe about listening to someone desperately fight for the exact thing you spent months wishing somebody would fight for with you.

But that was not the part of the conversation that stayed with me.

What stayed with me was who was saying it.

This is someone who has always been closer to my husband than to me. Someone whose loyalty, naturally and understandably, has always been more to him. We have always been friendly, but he was never my person. If anything happened between us, I would have expected him either to quietly take his friend's side or, much more likely, stay completely out of it.

And that is essentially what he had done.

He had never attacked my husband. He had never come to me to tell me that I was right and someone else was wrong. He had never inserted himself into something that was not his business.

Today wasn't that either.

That is exactly why it mattered so much.

He did not call me to criticize anybody. He called because he was hurting, and somewhere inside that hurt he suddenly understood mine.

He understood what it feels like to love someone who no longer seems to want the life you still desperately want. He understood the panic of wanting to fix something when you cannot make another person want to fix it with you. He understood how a perfectly ordinary day can continue happening around you while you feel like someone has reached inside your chest and started pulling things out.

And then he looked at me differently.

Not as his friend's wife. Not as one side of somebody else's marriage. Not as someone whose situation he needed to judge, explain or stay politely neutral about.

Just as another human being who had been hurting.

He acknowledged that what I had been living through must have been excruciating. Later, he sent me a message telling me that if I ever needed anything, I could call.

I stared at that message longer than I should probably admit.

Because it was the first time in almost five months that somebody from that part of my life had looked directly at the pain instead of around it.

That was what broke something open in me.

I did not need him to choose sides. I did not want him to say anything ugly about someone he cares about. I did not need vindication, an apology on somebody else's behalf or some grand declaration that I had been wronged.

I needed acknowledgment.

I needed one person who had every reason to stay out of it to look at me and say, in the simplest possible way: I know now. I understand why this is hurting you so badly.

There is an enormous difference between somebody believing that you are hurting and somebody suddenly knowing what that hurt feels like.

For months I have tried to explain it. You can say you feel abandoned. You can say you feel discarded. You can say you cannot understand how somebody who knew every ordinary detail of your life can suddenly behave as though you are a stranger.

Eventually there are no new words.

There are only different ways to say, “This hurts so badly that some days I don't know what to do with it.”

And people still need things from you anyway.

The phone rings. The emails come. Somebody needs an answer. Somebody needs you to make a decision. Somebody needs you to be competent and funny and normal and available. Life does not politely clear the calendar because yours has come apart.

So you learn how to function while it hurts.

You learn how to walk into work and answer the phone. You learn how to sit through meetings and conversations while part of your mind is somewhere completely different. You laugh when something is genuinely funny. You solve problems. You handle whatever needs to be handled. From the outside, eventually, you probably look almost normal.

Then you come home.

You shut the door. You find a dark room. You take off whatever armor carried you through the day, and sometimes you fall completely apart.

Then somehow you get up again.

That is what I told him today when he wanted to know how you survive this.

I could not tell him when it gets better because I do not know. I could not tell him there is some morning when you wake up and suddenly stop wanting the life you thought you were going to have. I could not tell him when the quiet stops feeling so damn loud. All I could tell him was that eventually you learn how to function while it hurts. You learn how to go to work, answer people, laugh when something is funny, handle whatever needs to be handled, and somehow make it through another day.

But that was not really what broke me open today.

It was realizing how desperately I had needed somebody from that side of my life to acknowledge what this has done to me. Not to take my side. Not to condemn anyone. Not to tell me I was right. Just to look at me as a human being and say, I understand now. I know this hurts. I know this has been brutal. I see you.

For almost five months, I have carried the pain itself and something almost as painful alongside it: the feeling that I was carrying it in a room full of people who had decided not to look at it. I kept showing up. I kept working. I kept answering the phone. I kept laughing. I kept doing whatever had to be done, and somewhere along the way I became so good at surviving it that I think people started assuming survival meant I was fine.

I wasn’t fine.

I was just getting better at bleeding privately.

And then today, somebody I never expected to say anything at all looked straight at the thing I had been trying so hard to carry quietly and acknowledged that it was real. He did not fix it. He did not make it hurt less. He did not give me back anything I lost.

He just saw it.

And I hate how much that meant to me.

Because I did not realize until that moment how long I had been waiting for somebody, anybody, to tell me that I was not imagining the size of the thing that happened to me. That I was not weak because I was still hurting. That I was not ridiculous because five months later I could still walk into my house, shut the door, and come apart.

Today somebody finally understood because life had handed him a piece of the same pain.

I wish with everything in me that it had not.

But for one moment, I was not alone inside it anymore.

And maybe that is the ugliest truth of all: sometimes you do not need somebody to save you. You just need one person to look directly at the wound everyone else has learned to step around and say, “Yes. I see it. I know why you’re still bleeding.”

And you know, I may not be the first lawyer this person turned to for legal advice and that’s fine, but I was the first person he turned to for understanding the pain. My quality as a person, my love, my loyalty, my empathy, I care much more about improving those qualities than I do about being the most popular lawyer in a very small fish bowl.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm

When Judith’s Desk Follows Her Home But Brings a Better Seating Arrangement and More Comfortable Clothes. Coincidentally, This is Also What I Have Been Describing As the Perfect Date: show up to my house at 11 pm in Jammie’s, a bottle of wine and a Netflix show already picked out and possibly help me dig through a complicated legal problem or brain storm writing ideas with me until the sun comes up.