2025 Weeks 17 to 20: Renovating My Life

It's been a month (!?) since my last note-to-self. Been feeling the need to take stock, but it's been hard to zoom out when you're in the thick of things.

Let's see: in my last post I wrote about my new partner, work and travel. What's come up since? Mainly: Jon and I have decided to separate. The way I put it makes it sound very amicable and reasonable, but in reality, it was a month of tearful confessions, backsliding, an unbelievable amount of pain.

26 April is when it started. I texted Jon that I'd be home for dinner, but I had dinner with my other partner instead. When I got home Jon was rightly upset with me for making commitments I couldn't fulfil. I think I had been under immense strain from weeks of disappointing not one but two partners, and that just broke me. I said, let's break up.

We kept triggering each other at home and he offered to stay in a hotel for a few days. During this separation something in me broke free, and I finally had the space to feel everything that I had suppressed for years. There were so many things (!) that I wasn't keen on at all but went along with because I thought that was what I was supposed to do as a good partner. The irony is that he didn't particularly want those things either and thought that I wanted them. So in trying to people-please we ended up pleasing exactly no one. What a tragic waste of life. 

30 April: backslide. Got back together, talked about all the suppressed things that surfaced while we were apart, promised to work through issues, etc. 

What followed was 3 weeks of uneasiness and tension and pain as I shuttled between two countries and partners, and continued feeling it was unsustainable.

In terms of practicalities, Jon and I agreed on divorce to start with, but then could not immediately think of what to do with the house we co-own. At first I thought that I had no right to whatever money I had put into it. But the idea of ceding hundreds of thousands of dollars was met with unanimous violent disapprobation from everyone who even remotely cared about me. After this deadlock I asked for money and we agreed on a settlement of half the current valuation, minus CPF refunds etc. 

I noticed that his initial gut-kick resistance to selling the flat also seemed to melt. Quite incredibly, we actually started looking forward to getting our own places and living independent lives. 

It turns out that it wasn't just me who had lost herself in the matrimonial unit. We both wanted to flee our families. We just grabbed each other as the quickest way out. 

We've never really fought about anything important until this year. I think it's because we had a tacit agreement to not destabilise the architecture of our temporary shelter. After all, there was nowhere else for us to go if this failed. So we chose to crowd out our true - and potentially destabilising - feelings and needs by cracking jokes and having fun. But shaky foundations collapse anyway.

Spent almost the whole of yesterday talking about how we're going to move on. There are so many things that are a blur, but there are a few things I know for sure that I want:

1. Divorce

2. My own place

3. To discover who I am

4. Platonic partnership with Jon

5. To see where my new relationship goes

Current mood: hopeful. There's been so much to unpack and it's been tiring. But now I feel relief that my priorities are not in direct conflict with one another.

I'm still feeling misaligned at work, but I'm putting it on the backburner as secondary to my life overhaul. Yes it's extremely uncomfortable for me to underperform at work - but on a deeper level, I just don't care all that much.