“After we made love I knew it was over. Did I ever really love Big or was I addicted to the pain? The exquisite pain of wanting someone so unattainable?” – Carrie (Sex & the City)

So, in the interests of having a new blog post, I put myself on the couch yesterday to find this ‘Pain Body’ Eckhart Tolle and a friend of mine speak of … trying to figure out if indeed it has something to do with my attachments and my reluctance to let go.

The astrologer who last year predicted not only the demise of my marriage but also the end of my romance, suggested I document my grieving process photographically. But my rawness seems more appropriately exposed in my words rather than my image which, as my life takes a new shape, manages to conjure the joys of life even as those closest to me throw me safety ropes and pull me out of the gaping holes in the earth beneath my feet.

It took three years, a separation and a love affair before I could make a tiny bit of sense of why my marriage failed. It is only now, during this current grieving process over my Mr Big, that I have come remotely close to gaining clarity and a path back to the knowledge I was nowhere near ready to harness previously. It was only once I managed to disengage from my husband that I could access the parts of me that could grow from the experience … and it wasn’t so much the disengagement from the man that was so difficult as the disengagement from all the stuff that eighteen years naturally brings to a relationship.

As I now try and let go of my One, I see that there was nothing outside of the intense connection; the very core of knowing I was Destined to be with him. The purity of this attachment to only the Man somehow makes it feel harder. But I let go of him in the knowledge that there was nothing in the relationship other than a hope of a future that was never real and the fear of losing someone who was never mine. I have learned that being Destined to be Together does not automatically make it so, but comes with Choices that Enable it to happen. I fell in love with the unattainable. But, like Carrie, I was probably just addicted to the pain of not having the One thing I truly wanted. After all, I get to keep the love and just let go of the man.

But there’s something inside of me that just doesn’t want to. And this is perhaps the ‘Pain Body‘ I have been trying to figure out … that part of me that aches to feel the pain just a little bit more; that part that doesn’t want to forget how it felt to rest my head in that perfect place on his chest; the part that wants to remember the feeling of safety when wrapped in his arms; the part that hoped unrealistically that I would be his One too. As I torture myself over photos, emails and text messages, the pain speaks to me and feeds off the agony of not being chosen.

Would it be too easy to let go and move one? Or would moving on and letting go of the pain, also liberate me from the joy of having known such intense bliss? Can we even have the one without the other? Like the pendulum, the left is countered by the right … back and forth with moments of balance at the centre point. Grief and joy need not necessarily be opposites but conspirators to a fulfilled and balanced life.

I’m deleting photos and emails one by one. The journals and notes get gradually burned on the fire and I again sit down with Archangel Michael in his skimpy shorts, and seek the assistance of his big sword to sever those ties that connect my heart so steadily to that of my One. Once I have disengaged I will be in a better position to assess what this is all about. Who says you have to stay friends with ex-husbands and ex-lovers anyway?

Penelope van Maasdyk, you need to lie down on the couch again …