Divorce (And ME/CFS)

Finalized in 2025, but there could be confusion…

My blog has been around for ages now and throughout postings folks will encounter my mentioning of my “ex” and of being divorced. I did not officially divorce until 2025, but in my heart and mind, we were divorced since our marriage ended after years of heartache. We did separate for years. Then the economy being what it was and still is, and my battle with ME/CFS, along with the needs of our three children converged as the most defining considerations. After reflecting on what outcomes we needed to nurture, we realized we needed to move back under the same roof in order to launch our children successfully. We literally were unable to legally divorce until 2025, but we gave each other room to pursue other relationships should the opportunities arise.

When we separated, we both felt confident my illness would still give me room to work and move us along to a finalized divorce before too long. However, confidence does not cure chronic illness and my health took a nose-dive the likes of which cornered me into working from the home and limited the time I could invest even in working from the home. I went through the cycles all ME/CFS folk go through where I would establish a fairly reliable baseline of possible activity and then life would pull the rug out from under me and leave me without a baseline, clinging to the couch for weeks or months at a stretch. Divorce became an elusive though sure outcome.

ME/CFS, and any chronic illness, catapults folks into challenging and nearly impossible life situations like the one I reference here where divorce is delayed for, gulp, two decades. If you have relatives or friends suffering serious chronic illness, be there for them. See them. Affirm their challenges and do what you can to help carry the burden. Know, too, that simply “going on disability” is not often an option and has been particularly challenging for ME/CFS folks since it has taken the medical community decades and decades to simply begin to acknowledge ME/CFS as a very real and non-psychogenetic illness. What does this mean? Note the words used here: Acknowledgement of legitimacy has begun and there are still far more uninformed physicians than informed. Medical neglect devastates many of the ME/CFS population and reaches into the legal work of seeking rightful financial relief. Those deciding whether or not ME/CFS is legit enough to warrant disability benefits are influenced by those who still suffer the terrible and often willful ignorance that leads to the abandonment of millions suffering with this real and debilitating disease. So, if the medical community still needs to catch up, the legal professionals deciding disability benefits will often not legitimize the need either. Then there’s the whole issue of whether or not spousal support from divorce will provide just enough financial support to block all possibility of receiving disability. The standards are galling. Navigating the possibilities exhausts and discourages the already weary, and is often weathered without help from friends or family. Be the exception if you’re able to be and roll up your sleeves in commitment to understand, bear witness and be with those sidelined by any chronic illness. The impact of ME/CFS is insidious and extensive, isolating and obstructing lives to the point of often complete alienation. Resolving divorce and income needs with such considerations is tricky work.

Meanwhile, should you be one of those who notes the strange and seeming inconsistency of my mentioning being divorced years and years ago, and then finally declaring our actual move to legally do so in 2025, you’ve likely scratched your head in confusion. You should understand why now. Life challenges can be surreal, and though divorce can take place often times before the actual legal act, legal marital dissolution is a powerful, needful spiritual and physical work. Don’t tread lightly into protracted separation. If you can avoid the limbo of not quite married/not quite divorced without wrecking the well-being and housing of those involved, do it. But plenty of people must continue to live under the same roof due to financial impossibilities. If you’re one of those unfortunately trapped, my heart is with you. Hang in there and get help in any way you’re able to do so.

jruthkelly3 Comments

2023 So Far…

How do I convey 6 months of epic challenge on many fronts, what has been going on?

Deep breaths, self-love and a lot of room for grieving.
Tense, gaining more awareness of the person I’m becoming.
Settled into the truth that my life belongs to me (as a former fundie, this is crucial).

But overall, I find myself defining this year as exactly that: definitive.

Someone absolutely, poignantly and beautifully precious to me and to my immediate family died suddenly.

She lived on borrowed time, but nothing prepares you. I’ve been unable to write any kind of memorial or much of anything at all. Instead I’ve either actively allowed the grief or ballistically refused any emotions associated with the grief. It turns out there’s only so much active and outward grieving a body can take within a certain timeframe.

So I’m finding the year punctuated by a few pauses. Particularly after the loss, pause/crash prevailed even if it looked like I was functioning. And when I’m not paused, I live in a way that feels like a tribute not only to the preciousness of my own life, but especially to all that Sarah couldn’t participate in for long, if at all. Just typing that little bit conjures tears. But I am seldom allowing much of their spill. It’s more about one step, then the next.

And along the way, the many newsworthy goings on hammer away at peace if you allow it. Need I state the obvious about our nation and the world? No. We all get it. But today, most of us awakened to the ongoing progress of holding the former president accountable. Fingers crossed for an actual measure of accountability and justice.

Besides all of that, I’m working even harder on what I think about and how I think while remaining aware of the energy I’m brewing. The aim is to cultivate everything that imparts creativity within myself and my world here. And I find the work of cultivation mostly to be about love and acceptance. Love informing the tasks at hand as I create and work to manifest a measure of financial abundance. “Manifest” is only used in that I acknowledge my attitudes and beliefs can either serve me or sabotage me. I acknowledge there have been times when it seemed like the universe brought me what I focused on receiving. There’s a bit of that sort of manifestation awareness at work, too. But the tricky, potentially upsetting bit rattles around reminding me that our main source of income is gone for now, daring me to indulge in fear, desperation.

Mostly the path has been massively stressful unless I insist my thoughts and actions along lines of resilience, faith and strength. And so, that is where I reside as much as possible. This insistence encompasses the ongoing work towards now keeping and improving my baseline of activity and rest. As a person with MECFS, the baseline can be lost and never retrieved depending on the circumstances. So far, retrieval has always eventually occurred for me. I’ve been very fortunate. Once a baseline is established, it’s wisest to maintain it for a period of 3 to 6 months (or longer should the MECFS experience be especially risk saturated). Beyond that, the path unfolds with gradually adding on new activities and then following those additions with maintenance months or years. It’s a tedious work wherein you seek to hold to a faith in your body’s ability to recover while recognizing MECFS can put you in the spin cycle out of nowhere. Maintaining a non-traumatized relationship to your health both challenges and galls simultaneously. So, insisting thoughts of resilience, faith and strength, saturating myself in love and patience bolsters and affirms as I work and play towards hopefully broader fields of living.

I would say that I can’t believe I’ve not posted since the holidays. But then I look at the trail behind me, and it makes plenty of sense. Throughout these challenges, the focus on Digital SoulSpeak continues, also experiencing pauses along the way. That I can even attempt an Etsy shop reveals how my world enables me, a person with MECFS, to focus on projects most folks with this illness can’t even remotely consider. I’m daily aware of the sheer luck and privilege at play in my life. My gratitude flourishes every time I recognize those bonuses as does a longing for everyone to experience the same. That’s not to say this has been easy. I’ve channeled the strength I’ve gained towards the shop and have had to rely on others for daily basics most take for granted. I would have visited my daughter when she noted how long it’s been since I’ve made the trip to see her, but now it’s just not possible. And though my visits have encompassed previously understood days of rest once I arrive at my destination, my energy needs to go towards creating and managing revenue streams. The risk is too high at this point.

So, it’s no surprise that the world of the ignored and underserved chronically ill remains uppermost in my thoughts. As I develop printables for Digital SoulSpeak, my aim is to shed light on that same world. In the meantime, my hope is to begin a website for the purposes of sharing and selling those products (and others) as I’m able. For now, my blog here should suffice as a platform for sharing the shop’s progress.

And that is it, in a rather large nutshell, the past 6 months.

Onward…

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In A Warming Sun…

I look out the window as it whispers quiet melodies of all the goings on going on without me. And yet I wonder whether goings on go on without me or if maybe we’re all connected. And if we’re all connected, are not the goings on of others also my own? If only I could know the quickened pulse of one dancing fit and free and not the rapid race of a heart working overtime for a body whose health declines more than sometimes, sometimes often without provocation.

In my own way, I do feel connected despite the isolation MECFS insists. I hear the city sounds outside my door, and sense a world full of doing. My heart tells me we are one, and in this moment I feel full. And while I feel full, I also feel the many things beyond my reach. Were I to grasp them, therein would a fullness peak, eventually waning. But I would remain.

photo by j. ruth kelly, all rights reserved

What I come to in my non-goings on of a life is that we all must land in the same place. We all face the inner world, an immovable yet flowing eternity. And that same world goes with us whether we are fit or frail and that same world remains when the noise and clamor fades.

I long for more doing and going and yet the fullness of the moment rewards me just the same. I am grateful to be here witnessing the play and tussle suggesting endless horizons. I look out the window knowing their promise.

They only guarantee experience.

Horizons don’t make us more free or more present. They simply pose a chance for more ways to grow and love in a world aching for peace.

But I look out the window and accept my rootedness for now. And I remember when I last chatted with my maple friends forever rooted in my front yard. They whispered a contented grace. They daily taste the world as whole and one, gathering life’s echoes as feast in a warming sun.

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