This month marks five years since my ex-husband moved out. He actually moved just next door, into another building in our co-op. It was what we agreed on: We’d share custody of the boys, half and half. In those early days, it felt surreal that our lives were still so close and yet completely changed. But here I am, five years later. I survived. We survived.
The morning after he moved out, I woke up to silence that felt different. It wasn’t heavy this time, but full of possibility. We had been living under stress and tension in the same apartment through the first year of the pandemic. We were two people coexisting, trying to hold together what was already unraveling. Many months earlier, I had asked for a divorce. My mind was ahead of my body. I remember feeling numb during the conversation. But that morning, in the stillness of our home, the decision finally caught up to my reality.
The house was quiet. The boys were with their father, and I already missed them intensely—their laughter, their noise, their sweet wet kisses. But beneath the ache was something I hadn’t felt in years: relief. Peace. An almost dizzying kind of freedom. For the first time in so long, I could dream without guilt. With the door closed on my marriage—now both literally and metaphorically—my life was entirely my own again: open, uncertain, and full of possibility.
I didn’t know it then, but that morning marked the beginning of what I now call my post-divorce glow-up. It wasn’t just the internal kind, but the visible one too. People noticed it before I did. My social-media followers, friends, and even my divorce attorney commented on it. And when I look back at photos from before and after, I truly did look like a different person. I looked alive again. It wasn’t about becoming someone new; it was about finally seeing myself again.
In those early days, I was still struggling. I had built a life around the idea that if I worked hard enough, loved well enough, and endured long enough, everything would hold. At least that’s what I told myself. Letting go felt like giving up on everything, even as another part of me knew it was the only way forward.
As a woman, a wife, a mother, and a physician, I had been both formally and informally taught to pour into everyone else before myself. My training and upbringing rewarded self-sacrifice: Keep your head down, do the work, meet the need. That lesson carried me far—through residency, motherhood, and entrepreneurship—but it also taught me to disappear inside achievement. I learned to be reliable, resilient, and agreeable, even when I didn’t want to be. Deciding to end my marriage and then choosing the direction of my life on my own terms was a radical departure from everything I’d been conditioned to believe about love, duty, and womanhood.
