Today’s Guest Blog is by Ellen Bradley
The day I returned home from my first solo business trip in more than 25 years, a divorce decree awaited me in the mailbox. While there was nothing more than coincidence with the timing, I did feel a sense of significance mixed with irony. Significance because the decree was a reminder that nearly 30 years earlier, I had given up a promising corporate job with tuition assistance to law school if I wanted it, for marriage and an intercontinental move. Irony because after 6 years of negotiation, the actual dissolution process was a matter of weeks. I had expected it to take longer. Nevertheless, I looked back nostalgically to a younger woman and remembered her enthusiasm, her belief that she would be able to balance an embryonic relationship, a new career, law school in new country, and eventually children with a partner who would love me and be supportive of all the amazing things I wanted to achieve. I hard forked my life – not for the first time – but so hard, that nothing else would come close for more than two decades, when I hard forked again.
A hard fork, in terms of blockchain computing, is when the chain of transactions is no longer backward compatible. When you cannot go back and reconcile the latest transaction with the first transaction, the continuity of the chain must be broken so a new, sub-chain can be started. That definition is just a complex way of saying things become so broken that you can’t go back to where you were before, and you must start again. A hard fork is a big deal, and not one to undertake lightly in blockchain or life. Having a child is a hard fork – your life will never be the same. Getting a divorce is a hard fork. Until the moment of the decree, the option to backtrack and try to fix the marriage exists. Once the judge signs the decree, you would have to remarry the person if you decided that you did want to be married to that person. That second marriage though is not the same – the dissolution of the first marriage was the end of the path for that unit of measure.
The past 18 months for me has brought a series of hard forks, following on from the hard forks I made in 2016 when I decided to take a break from my marriage, move to a place of my own, and start working again. First, my father died suddenly in February 2022; then my mother died in December 2022; we siblings cleaned out their house and so many of their possessions were literally tossed in a dumpster; in April, I quit a job that to which I had been devoted for 6 ½ years; Tuesday, I sold my truck and plow ending a bit of my independence; and of course, my divorce has finally concluded. And so now what? Do I continue hard forking until my life no longer resembles what it is now? Do I sell this house and move somewhere else? Or maybe just travel in an RV for years? Do I return to the pursuit of ambitions I previously held? Do those expire? Am I too late? What now? What next? Who the hell am I now? Why don’t I have the answers and why isn’t someone telling me?
A mild mental exhaustion has set in that I didn’t see creeping up on me. I haven’t given myself time yet to allow the hardness of the hard forks to settle deeply and become a part of who I am now. Vestiges of the daughter, wife, mother, librarian, and driveway self-plower I was remain part of my personality and how I see myself is mélange of those identities. I spent so long armoring myself in resilience and competence, that I forgot to allow myself to be human, to pursue pleasure for the sake of pleasure. This morning I wondered if I would ever have a creative thought again, because lately, it’s felt like my creative side was packed away in the same box in the basement where my childhood scrapbook may or may not be stored. It’s as if I haven’t located either in years. I’m not sure if they were moved here with me or could be recreated in some way by cobbling together what’s left of my childhood mementos and fleeting story ideas.
At the risk of misdiagnosing myself, I believe that the treatment for what ails me right now is letting myself walk this path for a while without any forks. Creating some ease in my life by not running ahead to the end of this path looking for the next fork, soft or hard, but simply strolling daily and letting the path reveal itself as I make progress. No new partners or pets, jobs, or vehicles for a while. Travel but keep the same house, and make it an actual home where I plan to stay. Not pushing to write but allowing the writing to accumulate. No degrees, but learning. While the uncertainty and loosey-goosey feel of this plan is uncharacteristically and uncomfortably unstructured for me, I think it’s what my tired brain and soul require. I need to let the blocks, the transactions on this particular chain continue linking, slowly if necessary, to get myself to a place where I feel like I am forward and backward compatible with myself as I am now. That’s going to be hard, because it’s so much easier to change the path than change myself, but I think in the long run, this will be simpler and softer, and therefore, better for me.
