Losing My Husband, Finding Myself: WATCH

My birthday has always been kind of a big deal to me…okay a really big deal. I think it had something to do with feeling empty on the inside and needing that one special day getting all kinds of external validation from the people who love me. Next week I’ll be 33 years old, my first birthday as a single man since I was 23.

But for my 32nd birthday, I didn’t want a huge party with all my friends celebrating me. I didn’t need a fancy trip to Palm Springs or a sexy dinner at Rosaliné. No, my ideal day was to shut myself in a room with my husband, who I loved even more than wine and cupcakes, while we both took a substance famous for inducing feelings of intense love. What I longed for more than anything was a single day feeling the burning fire my husband once had for me, the kind of fire I’d gotten used to seeing only when he looked at our new friend, a college kid 11 years younger than me, with whom I knew he had fallen deeply in love.

A few days before my birthday I got to try my hairbrained scheme. But it turns out even a pill can’t produce magic that isn’t there. The night of my actual 32nd birthday, April 28th, I got what I really needed. I participated in a ceremony where I would drink a powerful plant medicine known for producing intense hallucinations, divine wisdom, and profound healing. There’s much to say about that night but what stands out in my mind most profoundly is a moment when the medicine showed me all of my male ancestors from both sides showing up and giving me their blessing and their permission to not repeat the same mistakes they made. I was allowed to be different. I could break the patterns and be bigger, better, more loving, and more content than anybody in my past had ever been. The medicine said to me, “From this moment on, you are a new person.” It then zoomed in on every individual strand of DNA that I’m composed of and showed it being busted up and rewired. Next, it zoomed out, and in a scene reminiscent of The Beast turning back into Prince Charming with bursts of rainbows beaming from my body, I saw myself transition into what I can only describe as a warrior unicorn, a magical powerful man with a heart made of fire, the strength of steel, and a rainbow in my soul. I felt alive and rejuvinated but I thought the change was mostly symbolic. I had no idea that surviving the coming year would require me to become a warrior…and perhaps a little bit unicorn.

My experience at the birthday ceremony began a shift in me. Suddenly I had some self-esteem and being second best in my husband’s heart became unbearable. No warrior unicorn would settle for being the third wheel in his own marriage, as I had for more than a year, and there was only one solution I could think of: our friend had to go. It was nothing short of gobsmacking when I wasn’t the clear and easy winner of my husband’s heart. No, for three days he deliberated like Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice and soon after it was me who had to pack my bags.

Less than a month later I was lying on the floor of my bedroom for the third consecutive morning, drunk by 9 AM wondering if the light fixture would be strong enough to hold my lifeless body. I thought about each of my closest friends and considered whether I could possibly burden them with being the one to find me dead. It’s not that I thought life wasn’t worth living without my husband or that I wanted to die, it’s that dying seemed far less scary than living in my current situation. At that time it seemed like the only way my life could get worse was if I ended it, and I thought about doing so for some time, but in my early morning drunkenness, I had a moment of clarity. I was a fucking badass warrior unicorn and no way in hell was I going to let my story end like this. I said to myself, “Alright, Lucas, if you’re not going to kill yourself get your ass up off the floor because you’ve got bills to pay.” When I got up off that floor 3 decades of unworthiness, victimhood, and self-loathing remained on the floor never to darken my door again.

Here’s what I learned:

Love is energy, and energy cannot be created nor destroyed. 

With my husband suddenly absent from my life, all of the energy I’d spent loving him every moment of every day suddenly felt stagnant. It hadn’t gone anywhere, it was still built up inside me, but I didn’t know what to do with it. There was nobody to give the bigger ribeye to. No one to kiss good night. No one to gaze at lovingly while I talked baby-talk.

One day in the shower I was feeling miserably lonely and I could not silence the ugly voices in my mind. I decided to turn my focus inward, hug myself, and ask my inner-being “what do you want me to know?” I repeated the question a few times hoping desperately for divine guidance…and it came: as if someone else were speaking through my voice I began sobbing, “I love you, Lucas!” Still hugging myself I collapsed against the wall of the shower, the water pouring over me as I cried and said to myself, “I love you, Lucas” again and again. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life and I have not said a single mean word nor thought a nasty thought about myself since. Not once.

“You see, when we lose a partner we loved profoundly, our instinct is often to rush out and find someone else to spend all of that energy on, and we miss a profound opportunity to turn that love inward and allow ourselves to feel it.” 

For the first time in my life, I got to know how good it feels to be loved by me, to be nurtured by me. I talk to myself as gently as I would a sad little child who needs love and nothing, NOTHING else will do. Learning to love myself was the single greatest gift I’ve ever received. I want you to know how free you will become when you love yourself so completely and trust in your own goodness so faithfully that you can walk into any party, new job, or new date and know that if someone is unkind to you, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you, it means something is wrong with them. When you love yourself a little, each time someone doesn’t treat you the way you deserve, it feels so out of alignment with who you are that you must react, you must engage the conflict and defend your honor. When you love yourself with steadfast conviction, you’ll be unmoved when others are harsh and the love inside you can create space for others to bring forth the love inside themselves.

 Sometimes it takes tremendous strength to be gentle.

I learned the power of my own thoughts. 

When things are going well and something bad happens, we begin to fear that something else bad will happen, so it does and things get a little bit worse and a little bit worse and a little bit worse. When I was on that floor, the only way for things to get a little bit worse would be to die, and I wasn’t going to let that happen. So I found myself in a place of neutral stillness. For once in my life, I had no expectation that things would get worse. I knew that things could only get better, and that was an entirely new thought for me. I expected things to get better and therefore created the space for things to actually get a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better until they got a lot better. I learned that in every moment every thought we think and every action we take either creates momentum for our lives to get a little bit better or a little bit worse. It might sound like magic, and I won’t say it’s not, but your thoughts inspire your actions and your actions shape your world, and then your thoughts color how you experience your world. I used to think manifestation, the power to create your reality based on your desires, wouldn’t work for me. I had tried it. I spent countless Sundays studying at the school of Oprah listening to thought leaders talk about creating the life of their dreams. That would work for them but not for me. I was “stuck.” I could expel mountains of effort to produce a desired result and somehow manage to fail. If I did get what I wanted, the satisfaction of it always waned until I lost it.Now I know what was wrong. I was, in fact, doing everything right, which made me feel all the more cursed for not succeeding. What was sabotaging me where deep-rooted feelings of unworthiness that had dogged me since childhood. 

You can not manifest and feel unworthy at the same time. 

It’s like having a freight train with a steam engine on both ends facing opposite directions. You can do everything right and use all of your might to propel yourself in the direction you want to go, but your unworthiness will pull you back in the other direction with equal force. Learning to love myself and dropping that unworthiness was like taking a blow torch to the hitch of that steam engine facing the wrong direction. I started moving forward at warp speed and my life has continued to change for the better exponentially. I have come to believe in and expect miracles. All of my momentum is now pulling me in the direction of my dreams.

I learned the power of forgiveness.

 Forgiveness costs nothing. Blame, anger, and hatred? Those are expensive. They were costing me my sanity. Those first few months every moment in the shower, every moment in the car, basically if my mouth wasn’t moving because I was speaking, I was silently cursing out my ex. It was costing me my social life. If my friends were hanging out with my ex and his new love, it felt like a betrayal. It felt like they weren’t my friends anymore. How many parties did I miss, how many Friday nights did I just stay home alone because I was afraid I’d again run into him at a bar making out with the boy he left me for and just be wrecked for days?I wanted to forgive for a long time but my ego could not allow it. “He hasn’t apologized, he hasn’t atoned for his actions or taken any accountability for the pain he caused me,” I thought. How could I possibly forgive them when they’ve done nothing to right the wrongs? Forgiving without atonement felt like agreeing that I deserved the undignified treatment I suffered. But I eventually realized how disempowering it was to hold on to the anger. 

I realized that in my determination not to let them off the hook, I was thinking about them obsessively. 

They were on my mind nonstop. If I was planning where to go, I was worried they might be there. If I was at a party, I was afraid they’d show up. If they did show up, I’d melt into an anxious rage puddle on the floor and just stay there long enough to finish my tequila soda and leave to drown my sorrows with a scoop of salted malted cookie dough from Salt N Straw. All of that energy spent hating…I wanted it back. It was time to start thinking about myself and where I’m going, not them and what they took from me. So I surrendered. “Fine. If letting him off the hook means he wins and I lose, fine. He can win. I don’t need to win. I don’t need an apology. I don’t need anything. I just want to be free.” The day I made that decision, I did set myself free. My mind became free to focus elsewhere. I got to have fun and socialize with no fear of seeing them. I was finally able to look back and appreciate 9 years of beautiful photographs and memories and just be grateful to have had them at all. I could go to Taco Tuesday with my ex-husband, who was my best friend for nearly a decade, and begin to see him again for the love that he is, and not just the painful decision he made. I could maybe even one day find it in myself to hug my husband’s new love in an offering of peace.

I got my sanity, my energy, and my self all back for the low price of simply deciding I was ready to let go.

If you want to have a new experience you have to try new things.

Even as a self-proclaimed healer some things were just too woo-woo for me. I was too cool for hippie school. But the only reason we turn our nose up at those chicks with yoga pants and sage is that we secretly envy their inner-peace and we don’t think we’ll ever feel as good as they do, right? That stuff only works for them because they’re simple minded and we’re too smart for that hippie crap, right? (wrong.) I was desperate to quit hurting, and I decided feeling a little stupid was better than suffering. At some point, I decided I wasn’t too proud to sit cross-legged on my floor like an idiot repeating, “I am a money magnet, money flows to me easily and effortlessly.” I started listening to Abraham Hicks tapes about the “law of attraction” religiously. In the car. In my sleep. I felt like it was my only hope, and because it was my only hope I committed to it in a way I never had before. I learned to have faith that my efforts would produce results if I was willing to stick with them beyond the point where I began to feel discouraged by seeing no evidence that what I was doing was actually working. Then slowly it came. Little by little. The job came. Opportunities came. Clients came. I began meditating, sometimes with crystals (I know, right?!) every single day. I became obsessed with my own wellbeing. I began to focus all of my attention on trying and doing new things that made me feel good. Before my divorce, I didn’t have much luck in my healing career because I was afraid to step into it. I spent more time trying to think of some other thing to call myself or some brilliant branding that wouldn’t conjure the image of crystals and incense than I did putting myself out there so my clients could find me. My fear of what others would think stopped me from being able to do the most good for people who needed what I had to offer. Those thoughts crept up again post-breakup. I thought about what this person from middle school that I haven’t seen in twenty years or that jerk I often run into at parties or that Tinder date might think when I say I’m a professional healer. I thought, “Wow. None of those assholes were here when I was lying hopeless on my bedroom floor. Why in God’s name would I delay my dreams a moment longer because of what they might think?” I spent years learning how to facilitate healing in others. That makes me a healer and once I dropped my own stigma around that word and owned it, not only came the success but also I got to do tremendous good for others because of it. All of the new things I tried created room for me to become who I am now. Some of the things that made me feel silliest are the things that brought me the most healing and ultimately the most joy.

I learned to treat my alone time as sacred. To understand this point, I need you to be willing to hold two opposing ideas. First, an old AA quote: “When you’re home alone, you’re behind enemy lines.” Depression, addiction, and suicidal thoughts thrive in isolation. Rachel Maddow is my homegirl, but staying alone in my bedroom doing shots of tequila with Rachel on Friday nights was getting me nowhere fast. Isolation tells us we’re all alone in this world. It tells us no one else can possibly understand our pain, but that is a lie. We need connection to survive. Teal Swan says we need connection more than food and water, and that’s why when we’re heartbroken we can barely eat or drink. It is essential that you make every effort to stay connected to your friends and family or whatever support system you have, and if you don’t have one you must begin to cultivate one. All that being said, secondly, there’s no way around it: If you’ve recently gone through a breakup, you will be spending more time alone than you’re used to. Treat your alone time as sacred. Don’t judge or pity yourself for being alone. You’re not a loser for being alone. Make a conscious decision that this time is special. If Friday rolls around and you’ve got nowhere to go or no one to hang out with, it’s date night. You don’t need a partner to deserve a fabulous dinner. Do whatever makes you feel good. Initially, that may be almost nothing. Sometimes the best I could do was smoke some pot to chill out and go to sleep and then try again the next day. I spend my alone time flooding my brain with new knowledge reading healing books like Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself and A Course in Miracles, and sometimes a dance club just can’t beat having a bourbon on the rocks while listening to an audiobook about consciousness and putting together a psychedelic jigsaw puzzle.

“I mean…who does that? I DO, because it fills my geeky little Burning Man-loving gay heart with joy and I absolutely do not feel like I’m missing out on anything when I’m that satisfied. And how about that word? “Satisfied.” Take note of everything you do that makes you feel satisfied and commit to doing more of it.”

Quit Being a Victim. 

I had a victim mentality for most of my life, and certainly many things that happened in my childhood weren’t fair. There were plenty of ways the end of my marriage wasn’t fair either and I have every right to feel like a victim or be angry until the end of time but…fuck that. Whatever you’re going through, I won’t make light of it. If you hurt, you have the right to hurt. I want you to hear that: you have the right to hurt anduntil you allow yourself to feel the hurt fully, you can’t release it. However, we get so caught up in defending our right to feel bad because this person did that to us, or this thing happened to me and we have a right to do that and nobody can tell us we don’t deserve to feel that way. BUT… you have a right to feel good too. You have a right to a joyful and beautiful life full of love and success and when you begin to defend that right more fiercely than you defend your right to suffer, you will experience a dramatic shift in your life.

A few weeks ago I was blessed with the honor of witnessing a tribute to a woman I don’t think I ever met but was very dear to a few of my friends. She was leaving a concert my friends had given and on the way to her car, a man attempted to rape her. She fought so fiercely that the man became enraged and began slamming her head against her car and beat her within an inch of her life. She required 24 reconstructive surgeries. After six years of trying to heal from the massive trauma of what happened to her, she left a note saying she couldn’t fight anymore.

Her spirit has touched me so deeply and taught me that although I have pain, I have no idea what real suffering is. Most of us have 100 reasons to kiss the ground each morning. Some people really are victims, but no trauma erases your right to a rich and beautiful life. I will always advocate for that right.

“In the end, I learned that being in a relationship that makes you happy is not the same thing as being a happy person, and there is no substitute for being a happy person.“

No romantic partnership will ever be better than adoring who you see looking back at you in the mirror. If your outer world is a reflection of your inner world, and I believe it is, it’s a miracle I was somehow able to attract a love that made me as happy as mine did for as long as it did, and it’s incredibly exciting to think how good love will feel the next time around when I love myself as much as I love my partner. How much more I’ll have to give, how rich and beautiful our lives would be. I’m in no rush for a new relationship, but I suspect I’ll attract one quickly because the fastest way to find a partner who’s living their best life, is to get out and there and live yours, and that’s exactly what this badass warrior unicorn has been doing. 33 is beginning to look really effin good!

My friend, this is where the story stops being entirely about me and becomes your story as well. You see, I’m a healer, and much the same way our brain takes in new information and experiences it in the present while simultaneously storing it away as memory, as I was experiencing the darkest, most painful year of my life, I was determined to also simultaneously observe my experience objectively to analyze how I could use it to help others experience the same miraculous healing I did. This story is a how-to guide disguised as a memoir. I thought I knew pain before this year, but I was mistaken. One can never fully know the pain of another, but now, in your moment of pain, I promise you there is little distance between us. My biggest birthday wish this year is that you will let my story be a guiding light for you in your dark night. May I bring you hope that today can be the day your miracle arrives and a single sunbeam will shine on you and bring peace to your soul.

I never wanted my marriage to end, but I would never go back to the man I was before. I hope someday you, too, will look back at this time and thank your lucky stars for getting another chance to finally get it right. The road might seem long and the night dark but every single morning the sun will rise again, and so too shall you. I love you.

Watch Bane below.

Lucas Bane is a West Hollywood based healer who helps clients recover from traumatic breakups. For more information, check out lucasbane.com.

This story was originally posted on Medium.