You Are Not Your Divorce

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What if you could capture the best moments of your life and live continually in them? 

In the movie Vanilla Sky, the main character, David, has himself cryogenically frozen and locked into a lucid dream state. His consciousness is living a recreation of the time he fell in love and all was right with the world. He never has to experience heartbreak or tragedy again. Happiness plays on a continuous loop.

On some level, wouldn’t we all want that? No more sadness. No more pain. Just constant pleasure. 

Eventually, though, David comes to realize there can be no sweet without the sour. At the end of the movie, David is given a choice. He can continue to live in this dream state (even though he knows it’s not real), or wake up and face life as it is, with all its beauty and tragedy. What does he do? Spoiler alert…

“I want to live a real life,” he says. “I don’t want to dream any longer.”

I’ve been feeling like David lately. Several years ago, I got divorced. It was the most traumatic experience of my life. I experienced love, then lost it. 

Of course, no marriage is all sunshine and roses. There were hard times and arguments and struggles. But if I could freeze the good feelings and hold on to them forever, wouldn’t that be great? Maybe. But it wouldn’t be real.

Three years after my divorce, I wrote a book about it.

I wrote it to help others navigate their own divorces and to know they’re not alone. Of course, writing the book was also therapeutic—recalling the beginning of our relationship, the good times and bad, and trying to figure out what went wrong and how to move on. 

After the book was released, I came to be seen by some people as a kind of divorce “expert.” I’m not a licensed marriage and family therapist, I don’t have a Ph.D. in relationships… I was just one guy who went through the fire and emerged on the other side, stronger and hopefully wiser. As time passed, I started doing radio interviews and podcasts about my divorce. I even travelled to speak at a few divorce retreats.

A year ago, I was telling a friend that I was about to appear as a guest on a podcast. She asked what the topic was. I told her it’s about being divorced in your forties. “You need to get a new gig,” she said. She wasn’t being flippant. It’s just that she didn’t see me as “the divorce guy.” Her comment made me think. 

Technically, I knew that divorce didn’t define me. I even said so in my book. An experience like that definitely marks you. You will always walk around with scars you never had before. But it’s not who you are. 

I wasn’t a “divorced person.” I was just Chris. And that’s how my friend saw me.

So a strange thing started to happen. I started to see myself that way too. Time passed. The further I got from the publication of my book, and the more I moved on from my failed marriage, the more I started to evolve

Lately, when asked to speak about divorce, I feel less inclined. Not because I don’t want to help others. I do, and I’ll always share my experiences if it can benefit someone. But I’ve grown. I’ve changed. 

When someone asks me about divorce now, the topic just doesn’t interest me like it used to. This made me realize something I wrote in my book but didn’t fully realize until years later—that one day, I would wake up and my life would no longer be about my broken marriage. 

If I could freeze myself into some kind of perpetual experience of happiness like David in Vanilla Sky, would I do it? No. Because that’s not who I am anymore. I’m not the guy who felt moments of bliss in my marriage. And I’m not the guy who was shattered to pieces when my marriage failed. Today, I am—and I’m continually becoming—someone different. Someone new. And it’s good.

We do move on. The fact that talking about divorce these days feels less and less like me is proof of that. 

I haven’t stopped caring about people who are suffering through broken relationships. I’ll always share my experience and walk with them on the journey toward their healing, however I can. But I may not write about divorce as much. I may speak at fewer divorce conferences. I may “get a new gig,” as my friend suggested. 

What’s the gig? Now I’m the guy who’s just living the life God has blessed me with, enjoying new relationships, seeking out what God has for me now. Divorce will always be part of my history. But it’s just that: history.

If you’ve been through divorce, I believe you’ll eventually find yourself in this place too. The place where divorce doesn’t define you. You’ll no longer be the person who got cheated on, the person who had an affair, the person whose marriage failed. 

Divorce takes up way less of your mental and emotional time and energy. The landscape of your life shifts. You’re in a new land now and it’s living proof that God actually did see you through the trauma, you survived, and you moved on.

As David in Vanilla Sky realized, you can’t have the sweet without the sour. I have had the sour and it’s been long enough. It’s time to move on. Like David, I don’t want to dream—good or bad—any longer. I want to live a real life. 

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