438. The Messy Middle

After a divorce, Jolie Steele learned a valuable lesson: most of life is living in the “messy middle”. 

Jolie Steele is a coach and a writer. Check out more essays like this on her Substack, and follow her on Instagram. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

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I’m Jolie Steele, and It’s Going To Be OK. Every day, I wake up and think about how much further I have to go between. A and B.

How much longer I have, in the messy middle, between then and now, before and after, married and divorced. When do I get my Finish This Shit trophy? This is a fruitless trick, of course.

A silly little game I play with myself, pretending like I will get to the promised land of no problems. Life is the messy middle.

Still, what I didn’t realize about divorce as a parent, is that it’s so much more than the finality of signed papers, custody agreements, the shift of separating households, and learning to be alone in a house.

All of those changes are real, dramatic and seismic, but after all that, you’re still met with new challenges you couldn’t see at the start. Reminders that as a parent, the imprint of these monumental changes is forever.

Sometimes on my walks in the morning, I go through an entire cycle of resolve to despair, to hope, to courage, to resolve, and back to despair at some point.

For most of us, whatever caused the watermark of grief on our lives, seems like it bleeds into every aspect of our lives. Divorce was a portal for me personally, but the lessons are transferable to anyone in their dance with grief.

My divorce taught me that I am both my problem and my solution, and I think we all have our own portals in this sense, whatever they may be. My practice lately is to ease myself into letting go of anything but the now.

If divorce handed me anything, it’s the understanding that we aren’t promised any particular version of tomorrow or next week or next year.

No certain future is laid out before us, even when it feels like we know exactly where we are headed and how it will look. Life can and will have us landing on our ass whenever she sees fit.

She’ll take away what we thought we wanted and hand us what we didn’t. She’ll snatch the map right out of our hands and force us to scrounge for paper in the junk drawer to draw ourselves a new one.

So what we really have is this moment right now and the energy we generate around it.

I’ve been thinking so often about that very thing, the energy I generate in each moment and how it’s the only raw currency any of us truly have, and how magical that really is.

Amidst my grief, I’d get stuck on the parts of my pain that weren’t my fault or weren’t in my control, or were injustices so infuriating my body would tremble. I wasn’t wrong. Many parts of my story really are objectively shitty.

Still, what I see that life has been trying to push me toward is a calmer place where I realize I still have charge of my energy. My energy is my whole experience, and my experience in this very moment is all I’ve got.

So when the troubling thoughts come, and oh, do they come, with each new obstacle and challenge in finances, in co-parenting, in existing, in the heavy load of grief that always seems to be dragging behind me, I fix my mind on the moment in my hands.

I set the grief in a comfortable corner and notice the way my son’s hair falls over his forehead when he dances with a smile stretched across his face. I decide that I’d like to feel good now.

I let the rest go just for a moment, just to see how it might feel to drop the story of suffering. I take the power back. I hold the warm buttery toast in my mouth a little longer.

I watch my partner cook breakfast in attentive gratitude. I play a game of Uno with my kids and listen to their laughter like it’s my only moment on the planet, because it is.

I’m Nora McInerny. This is It’s Going To Be OK. We love hearing your OK things.

You can email them to us, Igtbo at feelingsand.co. You can call and leave a voicemail. We got a new number, 502-388-OKAY.

Feelings and Co. is a bunch of people who love feelings, including Claire McInerny, Marcel Malekebu, Grace Barry, and Amanda Romani mixed this episode, and our theme music is By Secret Audio.