I’m finally ready to talk about my divorce.

Two years ago, when my heartbroken, cautious posts about my divorce went viral, I accidentally rebranded as “divorce girl.” I was also in the very uncomfortable situation where people thought they knew details about my life and separation, but actually didn’t. They filled in the gaps with their own experiences, judgments, and assumptions.

Those gaps were intentional. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t feel whole enough yet to excavate that part of my life, other than to vent pure emotion.

Now I am.

And while you won’t get any tea that extends beyond me, my failings, and my lessons, I can share what divorce carved into me.

So hi, I’m Anela. I turn 35 this year. A couple of years ago, I moved, started over, and got my ass whooped by life. I got divorced. And today I’m really, really, really happy. Joyful. Free.

I think I got here because I had space to feel. Space for therapy. For alternative therapies. To process. To try and try again. And to absorb the lessons that divorce taught me.

Here are some of them.

People have always encouraged me to rush through my anger, to let it go and “embrace the positive” so I can be more palatable, more comfortable, to them.

So I swallowed it.

I buried rage under layers of perfectionism, trying not to slip into the “angry Black woman” stereotype.

But locking down parts of myself to avoid a stereotype just gives it power over me.

And anger is powerful. Anger provides direction. It shows me where I need to set boundaries, where my triggers lie, and where I need to communicate more effectively.

And in my case, it showed me what I needed to let go of.

As we get older it can be harder to maintain the sort of deep friendships that we associate with childhood and school days, the kind that come from shared hours doing parallel activities.

I’ve been guilty of this.

Too busy with work to sit down for dinner with the people I love. Forgetting to reply to that text because I’m sprinting from one thing to the next. Digging myself out of what I call the “divorce hole”—that swirling mess of feelings, debt, and paperwork—meant that even remembering to call someone felt like scaling a mountain.

And the shame compounds it. You forget to reach out, you miss a birthday, you flake on dinner. Then the guilt of that failure makes you pull back even more. A vicious cycle.

Sometimes it’s not shame, it’s love. We fall hard into romance, soaking up the softness and beauty of a new partner, and suddenly weeks pass without reaching for anyone else. Community slips through our fingers.

When my life fell apart, it wasn’t romance that saved me. It was friendship.

Being able to choose and build my own family is a privilege. And for me, family extends far beyond the partner I choose to love romantically. Family includes the friends who feel like siblings. The ones who will book a last-minute flight when it all goes to shit. The ones who can handle a seven-minute voice note (but only in crisis, I promise).

Those are the bonds that held me together when everything else collapsed.

So I do my best to treat my friendships with the same reverence as lovers. I invest time, care, and energy. I make space to see them, know them, hold them. Because they are what make this whole messy, beautiful life worthwhile.

A few months into my divorce, my therapist looked at me and said, “Maybe you’re also the problem.”

That’s what I get for going to a Black woman therapist who could truly READ me.

It landed like a slap. But she was right. I wasn’t just a victim. I was part of the dynamic I was raging against.

I had a pattern of choosing unreliable partners. Because if I never truly leaned on someone, then I wouldn’t be destroyed when they left. Or when they died. Like my dad did.

She helped me see that my hyper-independence wasn’t strength, it was a form of self-protection. A pattern I’d have to break if I wanted something different.

So yes… maybe, definitely, I’m also the problem.

A plan makes a bitch feel powerful. College. Grad school. Fellowship. THE job. Family.

ADHD masking as high-performing perfectionism is my jam.

And then the plan blew up.

Suddenly I was divorced. Broke. Exhausted. Waking up every day inside a life that looked nothing like the one I had mapped out. I felt behind, and I felt immense shame.

It took me a long time to realize that starting over doesn’t mean I failed.

Sometimes everything has to go to shit so it can get better. Sometimes I have to let go and begin again, even if it feels terrifying, even if it makes me feel like I’ve lost my way.

I’ve learned that starting over is an essential part of building a life that’s actually mine.

It literally helps you sleep better, reduces stress, improves your mood, even helps ease aches and pains.

It reminded me I could still feel joy in my body, even when my heart was wrecked. It reminded me I could choose myself, choose softness, choose release.

But more importantly, being able to control my own pleasure and developing an intimate, loving, and joyful connection to my body is a powerful thing. Especially as a woman in an increasingly controlled and puritanical society, reclaiming pleasure is powerful.

It’s healing. And a reminder that pleasure is the bare minimum… that in fact, it’s a non-negotiable.

I felt immense shame after using my emergency fund, running through my savings as I struggled to get out of bed or wash my hair, let alone go back to work full time. Going back to broke after years of working to build a nest egg hung over me. Yet another mark of failure.

Until my mom said to me one day, “Honey, emergency funds are for emergencies. I’ve had to use mine many, many times in my life. That’s what it’s for. To give you a chance to rebuild.”

She was right.

And what a privilege it was to use those funds to reshape my life into something better for me.

Being alone was uncomfortable as hell at first. Sitting with the swirling shit in my own head made me want to run, to distract, to escape.

Sleeping alone gutted me. I missed the sound of someone else breathing, the warmth of another body beside me. Nights felt endless. And everywhere I looked, society was reminding me that partnership is the mark of success, the gold star for women who’ve “made it.”

But slowly, I saw that joy and fullness don’t only live in romantic relationships. I had to do some unlearning, some rebuilding, some reshaping of what family and community meant to me.

Being alone doesn’t have to be lonely.

It can be everything. And I say this now with my full chest, even as someone who is partnered again. I know in my bones that learning how to be happy alone was a key to building the kind of relationship that I always wanted.

Thank you for reading, truly. If any of this resonated, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.