For the heart to open, it has to break, again and again.
Opening the heart asks us to forgive, to let go of old grievances. That doesn’t mean the scars disappear; they stay, not as wounds but as markers of how we’ve grown through this human life.
I was married to Mikey B for ten years. We have three kids together, two of them now adults. We met young; he was 18, I was 22. We grew up together. We loved each other deeply, and we also hurt each other. We made mistakes. We couldn’t hold the family shape we were taught was the only way.
Ten years ago, we divorced.
We broke each other’s hearts. We broke our own.
Real forgiveness takes time. Building bridges and learning new ways to relate takes time. We fell over a lot in those ten years, more than once.
And still, here we are.
10 years in, after many years of pain, we are very happily divorced, living our individual lives, friends who have each other’s backs.
This Christmas, Mikey gave me a gift, it was a surprise, and it came with a typed letter, because he’s an analog guy.
That letter is a testament to what’s possible. To the capacity we have to move through heartbreak, to forgive each other and ourselves. And more than that, to let heartbreak become the very thing that opens us wider, to love, to truth, to the divine, to who we really are.
I wrote this post for Instagram a few months back and wanted to share it here with this community as a reminder that real forgiveness is possible, and that we can rise again and again and again.
My divorce was a rite of passage. One of the major events that shaped who I’ve become, forcing me to see beyond the pain and the structures of my mind around how things “should be.” It taught me the power of real forgiveness, and it asked me to become deeply intimate with both my pain and my heart.
You can read the story of my metamorphosis after divorce here, in one of my first Substack posts. The story is still being told. Life doesn’t stop; it just keeps happening, and for the heart to fully open, it must continue to break.
XX
Tahl
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