The Physical Toll of Divorce

I’ve aged a decade in one year.

“Is my passport here or at the bank?” Joseph (my quasi-ex-husband) texts me.

Of course, he doesn’t remember the big deal of closing our safe deposit box last year because the bank branch was closing and it’s impossible to find a massive safe deposit box anymore at Chase. Of course, he doesn’t know where his own damn passport is.

I text back, “Here. We had to close the safe deposit box at the bank.” He replies that he’ll come up in a bit to get it.

Dammit. We had our second mediation session (will write more on that drama in another tale) which carried over into a heated discussion last night and this morning.

My stress is on high alert so I decided to splurge on time and lay back with a 20-minute face mask. I can’t let him see me using a face mask because then he’ll use it later in an argument that I’m not working hard every day, I’m kicking back with face masks. I text him that I’ll get it for him in a bit.

As I lay there, my brain wanders to a likely scenario if we weren’t getting divorced.

In this scenario, I walk over and hand him the passport. Joseph opens it up and sees that it’s expired.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was expiring?” he’d ask, annoyed.

“It’s not my job to keep your passports up-to-date.” I’d reply. To him, this is considered an attack so I just caused a fight.

“You keep track of yours and the kids, it would be simple courtesy to do that for mine too anyway!” he’d spout back.

“I can’t keep track of your passport expiration date when I’m already worrying about three others,” I’d say. “You’re an adult, you can manage your passport.”

This would inevitably lead to a fight, caused by me by telling him in an attacking manner that I’m not handling his passports. And that I insinuated he’s a child because I told him that he was an adult.

Back to reality. As I’m laying on my bed with a red ginseng face mask, my heart is pounding from an interaction that hasn’t happened. My heart is already stressed to the max from yesterday’s mediation session and this mental trip isn’t helping.

It’s a reminder of how much this relationship has affected my physical health, especially during the divorce. My body is in extreme caution mode. I’m constantly walking through landmines brought from years of a shitty marriage and a tumultuous divorce.

Conventional wisdom says that anxiety over an event that hasn’t happened serves no purpose. That wisdom doesn’t know what it’s like to live on the edge, feeling like at any moment a fairly innocuous sentence can cause World War III.

After my unrefreshing 20-minute mask, I find the passport and go downstairs. Joseph’s office door is closed (he started a new job this week). I slide the passport under the closed door because I can hear he’s in a meeting.

Again, my brain goes into hypothetical event mode. I imagine him getting pissed that I slid it under the door because it ended up under the pile of shit that he has hoarding in there. Or he just can’t find it because like the remote control in front of his face, he can never find anything.

I imagine telling Joseph, “I didn’t want to just leave it on the counter in case you didn’t see it and then the kids end up doing something with it.” His reply back would be, “That’s just rude to slide it under the door. I wouldn’t have done that, I would have handed it to you.”

This would lead to an argument because I gave an excuse first instead of apologizing.

I’ve explained many times that maybe it’s an autism thing but unless I’ve blatantly hurt someone (like they’re bleeding out from my knife stabbing), my instinct is to explain my thought process so that the other person understands that I didn’t have ill-intent. I will never think to apologize first when it’s a misunderstanding with no real consequences.

Back to reality. Again. I have to settle my heart and actively bring my brain back. To hedge off the above scenario, I send him a text advising him that I slid it under the door.

All of these constant fight-or-flight reactions are destroying my body.

My sleep cycle is a hot mess. I’m exhausted all the time, to the point where I fell asleep on a pile of towels when doing laundry. Having been a zombie all day, I try to make up for it with some productivity at night. But even when trying to get to bed sooner, my body lays awake with insomnia and anxiety. The cycle repeats itself.

My kids think that I’m lazy because they think I sleep all the time. I don’t let Joseph see me squeeze in a nap. I don’t need him berating me that I’m barely watching the kids because I stay up super late and then sleep all day when I should be following proper sleep habits.

I’m obsessed with aging. The toll this has taken on my skin is unreal. There are no serums that will compensate for the accelerated rate of fat and collagen loss to my face. I look in the mirror and see someone who looks like she’s ten years older. I don’t do selfies or videos of myself anymore; it’s too horrifying to see the drastic change that seemingly happened overnight.

My hair has gone grey during this pandemic. For the first time in my life, I now dye my hair for reasons other than “for a fun change”.

I once did hand modeling. Now, despite all my efforts, my nails are splitting and break constantly. My hands are constantly shaking. It’s affecting my ability to draw a straight line even with a ruler.

Sometimes the anxiety is so bad, I can’t type emails for work; my fingers can’t accurately hit the keys. As a writer, typing with ease and speed is something I can do in my sleep so to struggle with even a basic task like typing is frustrating.

Depending on the day, the anxiety becomes so bad that my fingers get numb. It’s similar to when you sit on your foot for too long and the circulation is cut off. The tingling also hinders my ability to type and do work. It also makes it hard for me to concentrate and be “in the moment”.

What was once a fairly fit body is now an aching pile of bones surrounded by human tissue. Everything aches. Everything creaks. I’m trying to keep up but it’s like running uphill against a mudslide.

Do I sound like a cranky old lady yelling at kids to stay off her lawn? Because inside, that’s how I feel.

A year ago, I told myself I could plow through and survive because “one year from now it won’t be this bad.”

I was wrong.

While it’s not as bad as when I first told Joseph and he had hysterical meltdowns daily for months, now it’s just a state of hypervigilance. Any time there is a disagreement, I feel my body filling with anxiety like I’m filling a jug with water.

And then I walk around with all this anxiety sloshing around my human shell. I begin planning the next stages of Which Worst-Case Scenario Will Happen Next with unlimited outcomes.

Right now, Joseph controls the divorce.

It’s on him to refinance the house to cash out for me to get my down payment. It’s on him to cash out a 401k (one that he said he would do in full, which is now by half, and I’m at his mercy that he doesn’t decide to skip it altogether because he’s not obligated to) which takes months of paperwork to file a Qualified Domestic Relations Order to get it.

It’s on him to decide if he even wants to be that generous, despite that he’s getting a 4000sq ft house with a pool while I have a car and an inflatable mattress. It’s on him to decide whether I have to pay half the mortgage as my rent once he refinances (I convinced him to go down to a 60/40 split since I desperately need every penny to try and buy a house in this fucked up housing market). It’s on him to make sure he doesn’t go berserk and get a lawyer like he threatens to do now and then.

I had to beg him to not consider my Medium and side hustle money as actual income when working with the mediator to calculate child support payments.

I worked for several months to get the side cash to pay for the mediator and now I’m continuing just so I have a fighting chance at getting a down payment for a house. I don’t intend on hustling like that after I finally land a place. My body can’t handle the stress of working a full-time job and a few side gigs long-term.

In other words, I have to stay on Joseph’s good side so he doesn’t insist that my temporary side hustle money count towards long-term child support payments because my body is too tired to juggle all of it. It’s absurd to me that the money I raised specifically to pay for divorce mediation so it wouldn’t come out of our joint account is what he might use against me as income.

It’s on me to make sure things stay civil. It’s bad enough the kids asked me, “why does Daddy always cry?” I don’t trust him to not tell them something like, “I’m crying because Mom doesn’t want us to be a family anymore!” While that’s not my fault if he does that, I do bear the responsibility to clean up the permanent psychological mess that will occur.

With Joseph having all the power, there are days that I can barely breathe. My body is ready to collapse.

My only reprieve is to stay holed up in my bedroom-slash-office. It’s easier to avoid our situation and lessen the chance of stepping on Joseph Land Mines.

I did therapy for a while but eventually, there wasn’t anything a therapist could say to me that was any more helpful than me typing up my gripes here on Medium.

Also, I can’t afford the copays because I need to save every penny to move out.

I realize this article will prompt dozens of, “you need a lawyer!” replies. Unfortunately, it seems that because his inheritance was clearly traceable from beginning to end, despite it being used for marital assets, he will most likely get to keep it. And if I got a lawyer, he’ll go all-in, and because he has more money to gamble, he’ll drain the little bit of savings that I have on legal bills.

I’ve already spent $8k on a mediator and $1k to file the divorce paperwork. I can’t dump $5k on a retainer for a lawyer that will inevitably go over that. Maybe if I didn’t live with him, it would be different. But going balls-in combative with a lawyer while we live together terrifies me. I can barely handle life this way; with a lawyer, I’ll be stuck here even longer in an extremely hostile environment.

I’m not strong enough for that.

I physically can’t handle any more stress.

All I have is to keep my eye on the prize: a tiny, dilapidated house with a mortgage higher than the one I currently pay for a house five times the size.