In a period of my life where I feel on top of the world and better than I have ever been, some days I wonder if I will ever completely feel whole again. This is the divine dichotomy. The paradox of progression.
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Oddly I feel no reservation about being vulnerable in this post. I’m over that now. Actually caring what people think of me and the real life story they’ll never know? It’s exhausting. I’ll tell my story, you tell yours. There’s a life altering truth that took me a really long time to understand, which is that everyone we meet is simply a mirror that is reflecting our beliefs and perceptions back to us. This is an incredibly powerful truth. The answer is always to take responsibility and look inward.
I don’t know why I randomly decided to sit down at my laptop LITERALLY an hour ago, type this straight with no edit and then publish, but expression is beauty and stories empower humans.
Everyone else has had the last five years to tell their version of the story of MY life, which by the way, almost everyone got about 98% of the details and facts wrong so congrats on your great journalism skills. So here’s a very small part of my simple story. It’s a really weird feeling to be so detached from reality. To see the beauty around you, to genuinely appreciate all that is in your life and how far you have come, and yet to have moments that are still connected to your past Self where you don’t really feel anything. I mean I’m “happy”, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been to some gruesomely dark places in my life, as have we all, and just having the absence of darkness in my life is more than I could have imagined a few years ago. Once you have been in the darkness, you learn to appreciate everything that shines. But things are different now… I’m not that innocent, naive, happy-go-lucky kid anymore. In a way, my happiness is manufactured. Not fake. Not superficial. Man·u·fac·tured: to make or produce by hand. So if it’s manufactured, does that mean it’s not real, or not natural?
THE MOMENT I DIED…
Out of survival, I built who I am today. I had to because I could no longer remember who I was. On January 1, 2017, my world fell apart. My fiancee at the time called me multiple times before 6AM in a panic stemming from something she had just done, but didn’t yet have the courage to fully confront me with. This saga would soon turn out to be months and months of trickle truth which eventually led to her confession of infidelity. Looking back, that was the moment I died. Talen no longer existed after that moment. My reality, identity and belief structure had been completely shattered and spewn into my face in a million pieces. In what seemed to be an impossible decision, I felt that to forgive and move on was the right thing. As a couple, we believed that we could overcome this devastation, simply put the past behind us and create a beautiful future with a fresh start. Unfortunately, our relationship was now a shattered piece of fine China that was beyond repair. It was unfair. It was unfair to me of what she did, and it was unfair to her that I decided to move forward with the marriage when I really needed to stop everything and heal.
The larger part of me didn’t want to go through with it, but a smaller part of me felt it was the honorable and necessary thing to do. I needed to face my problems, not run from them, right? You know, forgiveness. Second chances. Grace and mercy. But unbeknownst to me, I wasn’t ready to forgive. Why? Because I hadn’t even somewhat processed what had happened. I didn’t even know the full story, but I was young and naive with good intentions, and no one could stop me. I truly believed that we could work it out and I’ve always believed in the impossible, but the reality is I had absolutely no f*cking clue the path that was ahead of me and the truth that would soon reveal itself and seep into our sacred union of marriage.
The honest truth is that deep down after that moment of blackness, I didn’t want to be anywhere near her. Not because I didn’t love her, but because every time I saw her or heard her voice, all I could think about is what she did. I had this tape recorder on repeat that would play over and over and over inside my head, my frantic mind maliciously piecing together the fragmented details she had given me. And that was extremely unfair to her. I held it against her. I couldn’t move beyond it. I tried to let it go so that we could move on with our separate life paths of healing. But I didn’t know how. And to make things worse, because she now was operating out of fear, her story kept getting altered and restructured every time the subject came up and either new details were revealed that perhaps she had supressed or forgotten, or old details were exposed as fabricated. I wanted so bad to just pretend none of this ever happened. Trust me, every part of me wanted to leave that demon buried and I tried so hard every agonizing morning that I opened my eyes, but unfortunately the “it” was an ever-changing story that morphed into multiple “its” and seemed to unbury itself, whether I wanted to see it or not. That one-headed demon quickly turned into a five-headed monster. My sense of reality fell apart. I didn’t know what version to believe. I was absolutely broken and felt abandoned and betrayed. I now know what I didn’t know at the time; a healthy relationship takes two healthy individuals. She felt broken, I felt broken, and our relationship was clearly broken. She was drowning in guilt and shame of which I was not able or available to provide emotional safety for her to heal because I desperately needed healing, and I was drowning in feelings of betrayal, distrust and loneliness of which she wasn’t able to provide the safe space and assurance I needed, because she needed to heal. It was a cycle that was doomed to destruction because we were looking at the other to be our hero instead of ourselves. We had both come into the relationship with previous wounds and expected the other to fill those needs. The ultimate recipe for disaster. Stack what just happened on top of that, and it was the equivalent of shackling two 1,000lb weights to each of your ankles in the middle of the ocean in the eye of a storm and trying to swim. The only outcome was sinking to the depths of a dark hell.
The extremely short version of this story is that we believed we could overcome the odds (along with some motivation from fear, guilt, shame, religious culture, family, beliefs, savior complexes, etc.) so we ended up getting married, moving to the paradisiacal Bali for my work, only to return on an emergency flight back to the United States, undertake couples therapy where a never-ending vault of new details seemed to emerge, and then soon after followed by divorce. It was an absolute disaster. I’m obviously sparing you all the twisted, convoluted and debated details that I also can barely remember anymore, but needless to say, our marriage lasted less than six months. I found myself in a complete out-of-body experience trying to process and deal with the entire experience. I never had time to grieve. Or should I say, I didn’t know how. I told myself I needed to man up. To get over it and be happy again. To not show that I was deeply hurt and that I just wanted to collapse in somebody’s arms and cry. To not show that I was internally cursing God and questioning how in the world someone could do this, while at the same time quickly losing my faith in just about everything. I had to pick up every little splinter, piece by piece, and attempt to re-construct myself. And what pieces I couldn’t find (which seemed to be the majority), I had to produce by hand. I manufactured. I created.
YOUR LIFE IS YOUR ARTWORK. DISPLAY IT.
I’ve never publicly talked about my divorce before this blog. I wish I did. So many false stories were construed and made up about my marriage and who I was. Our divorce seemed to be very public at the time, and rumors circulated like wildfire. I heard the most asinine and stomach knotting lies. Some of them ruined my reputation by means of facts and details that were evilly distorted. As Robert Greene states,
“Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.”
I abandoned my life’s artwork as a creative. I compromised my inner artist. At the time I felt like I was taking the high road. I was so emotionally broken and felt so much pain that I didn’t want to deal with the rebuttals. I also didn’t know how to state that the love of my life wasn’t loyal to me, while also not disparaging her in the same sentence and taking responsibility for my part in a dually failed marriage. It seemed like it became a war of recruiting sides. Who was on my side, and who was on hers? Whose story was the truth? Because I never told my story, there was only one to hear. And it wasn’t mine.
The straw that broke the camels back was when a rumor got back to me that absolutely broke me; a rumor that I had cheated on my wife, and that was the reason for our divorce. As much as I’ve tried to suppress that memory from my mind, I still remember the exact day and location it got back to me. To be so hurt and decimated from betrayal, and then to hear a story that was completely FLIPPED was psychologically damaging. It was a game of toxic telephone and almost 100% of the people that were talking about me I had never met in my life. I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know where to turn. I had no support, and it seemed like the entire world was suffocating me. I didn’t want to fight these rumors. I knew the outcome would be useless and I didn’t have the energy or emotional bandwidth to witness more negativity around me. I had no soul left. I was defeated. I’ve never felt so misunderstood, wrongly judged and lonely in my life. So I left. A couple weeks later I found myself in my new home; traveling between New Zealand & Australia.
I look back now and see things more clearly and have much more compassion, empathy and understanding, and I still don’t have any regrets. Although most decisions were made out of fear because I was in survival mode, there were some decisions that were made out of love. One thing I do know is that I loved her. In a way, I still do. Before the cascade of pain and emotional suffering, there was true, playful love. I don’t believe she intended to hurt me. Just like I would hope that if I caused pain, she would know that I didn’t intend it. We all have pains, traumas and programmings from our childhood that rear their heads into adulthood that may not be our fault, but it’s our responsibility to break that cycle and heal. If you don’t heal from what hurt you, you’ll bleed on those who didn’t cut you. It was an unfortunate luxury. A part of me will always be dead, in that marriage and divorce. It took everything from me. In those moments of life where I seem to feel nothing, I’m usually somehow spiritually linking back to that moment. On the other side of the same token, it gave me everything I now have. Grief changes you. You get to decide in which direction.
LEARNING TO LET GO OF THE OLD ME
In 2018 I was living in the Gold Coast, Australia. Most of my time spent there was an incredibly dark period, but one memory specifically comes to mind that I’ve never spoken of. I found myself hospitalized after an incident, and I was shortly thereafter “diagnosed” with Major Depression Disorder, Borderline Psychosis and Anhedonia. Talk about a life shift, eh? I put “diagnosed” in quotes for a reason, but that might need to be another article. Needless to say, the diagnosis was more of a relief than a surprise. Up to this point, I literally didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. I trusted absolutely no one, and I was really messed up. Mentally, emotionally and physically. Before all of this, I was a fit individual with a muscular build weighing in at around 195lbs, and now I found myself lying on a gurney weighing in at 163lbs. I had resorted to cutting in order to release the emotional pain, and the walls seemed to be closing in around me. Everything that I believed and trusted proved to be false, and that created an existential identity crisis. The very person that was “supposed” to love and support me was the very person who took that power and destroyed me. How could I trust anything at all? This diagnosis made me feel like I had some sort of grip on reality and that I was able to fit my expansive loneliness into a container that seemed to have a name, a label and a solution. Anhedonia however, was a new vernacular. I had never heard of it. And if I had known in that moment that it was going to take me about two years to heal and overcome, that diagnosis wouldn’t have brought quite the relief that it did in that moment. I guess that’s why we aren’t all able to tap into our future; the sheer complexity and substance of it would break us. The expansiveness would cripple us.
Anhedonia is essentially your brains default mechanism of protection in a deeply traumatic scenario. When you experience something that sends such a voltage of shock through your neuronal pathways, your pre-frontal cortex will short circuit in order to create a buffer and dampen the psychic blow. Otherwise, your brain would go into hyper overdrive and literally fry out. So in the cause of self-preservation and survival, your miraculous body creates an effective short-term solution. Unfortunately, without the proper tools and skills to override this default program or to heal from this effect, there are serious long-term consequences. Anhedonia. Emotional flatlining. Nihilism.
For months on end, I felt nothing. Truly nothing. I couldn’t even taste my food. Music was emptiness floating through the air, and seeing people laugh, cry or even argue was like watching a silent film in black and white. I remember hitting about the 18 month mark of recognizing that I still couldn’t feel. Because I couldn’t feel, I had to learn and understand how to manufacture emotions. Again, not fake-it-till-you-make-it type vibe, but actually learn how to create and re-produce them by hand, and maybe in that process of manufacturing I would then learn how to naturally feel. Just maybe. And that is what began a long journey of self-awareness. Learning how to create beliefs, thought patterns and core values that can act as triggers to release specific EMOTIONS that you want to FEEL. Out of survival, I learned how the mind and body work. When I realized that emotions are simply energy in motion, manufacturing emotions then turned into generating energy, and energy is life. I’m sure there is someone reading this who can relate. Are there days where you wonder if you are emotionally numb? Days where you feel so disassociated from what you used to love, and who you used to be? Shifting identity is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Letting go of the old Talen and coming to grips with the fact that I am a new version of myself was a really hard pill to swallow. Looking back, there was so much suffering involved in that transition because I resisted.
Pain x Resistance = Suffering
THE PURPOSE OF GRIEF
Suffering is necessary until you realize it’s no longer necessary. I didn’t need to suffer, I needed to learn how to let go and grieve. Grieving is a superpower. It’s a skill. And it was a skill that not only did I not have, but I didn’t even know anyone who had it or even talked about it. It was so alien to me. Because I didn’t know how to grieve, I suppressed it. When you suppress grief, it turns into chronic depression. Not only did I need to grieve the loss of my marriage, but I desperately needed to grieve the loss of my old Self. I needed to understand that grief changes people. And that’s okay. Maybe that’s the whole purpose of grief? To teach us not to hold onto things. To teach us not attach to outcomes. To teach us that life ebbs and flows and moves in seasons. That everything is impermanent. To teach us not to resist pain, love or change, but to surrender to the Universe and just continually recognize things and moments for what they are; experiences and opportunities to express Who We Are. To claim who you are in each moment. That’s the beauty of life. In each moment you get to claim anew who you are, and who you want to be. You can rewrite you story anytime.
As I finish up this random and fastest blog post I’ve ever done, maybe that was the purpose for me. Hopefully it gave some insight to others and maybe sparked some inspiration to those in dark places to keep going. If you thought this was somehow a dig at my ex-partner, F*ck you. I’m filled with nothing but love and gratitude for this experience and for her. For me, I think the purpose of this was exactly just that. To express my grief in the form of story. To let it go publicly to the Universe. To say it out loud. And to tell my story as I see it, and as I live it. Because it’s exactly that. IT’S MY STORY.
It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks or believes about who you are, because your story becomes the framework for your life. And each time that you live and express your story, you are crafting your life’s artwork. And if your life’s artwork ends up broken, understand that you can build back even more beautifully. In the Japanese culture there is an art called Kintsugi. It’s the art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold — built on the idea that in embracing flaws and imperfections, you can create and manufacture an even stronger, more beautiful piece of art. So is “manufacturing” happiness considered real in my opinion? It’s art. It’s taking something that was broken and making it even stronger and more unique. Uniqueness is not in existence, but in expression. We are all artists and creators, so whether in happiness or grief, express, for expression is how we communicate who we are and it’s the beginning of crafting WHO WE WANT TO BECOME.
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TALEN