BREAKING BAD BREAKING BAD

It doesn’t matter whether you are breaking up with a lover or a seemingly dream job – it’s never easy to detach from something that has played a big part in your life. LIADÁN HYNES examines the art of separation.

Liadán Hynes examines the art of separation

Is there anything more annoying t ha n t he inspirat ion quote “positive vibes only”? It’s surely even less likely to achieve results than telling someone to relax? Because of course, life is not positive vibes only. And when you are going through something difficult, being told to be positive, to see the bright side, is guaranteed to make you feel worse, like you are further failing, for not feeling at all positive right at that moment.

So when my editor sent me Happy Again! The Art of Positive Separation by Eveline Jurry, I was ready to hate it. That chirpy exclamation point alone was enough to do it; my hackles were raised.

The last thing people who are separated need is yet another person telling them that it is possible to get through divorce positively. Because divorce is hard. And telling people that it should be otherwise? We already have Gwyneth for that.

As it turns out, Jurry’s book is anything but an attempt to harangue you into thinking there is a way to get through divorce that is not bruising. Jurry, who lives in Amsterdam, is herself divorced. And while there is some mention of taking inspiration from her parents and grandparents’ examples of getting through the process of a marriage breakdown “while minimising the effect… on me and my siblings”, this is really a book that acknowledges the grind-you-down-difficulty of a relationship falling apart, but then provides you with a road map for putting things back together.

“Turns out, witnessing family members in the process of positive separating and going through it myself in real time were two very different things!” Jurry writes. “Focus and determination were my keywords, but the actual process was chaotic, nerve-wracking, and traumatic.”

Jurry’s marriage wasn’t in obvious distress when she decided to end it. Rather an enforced period of quietude after an injury made her take a long look at her life and realise that she was deeply unhappy. She had used busyness to hide the fact that she was “on a road to a dark place”. She tried to tell herself, “It’s not that bad. We have a good life. I can be okay here.”

Giving yourself permission to leave a situation when it’s not, ostensibly anyway, breaking you can be tricky, whether it is a romantic relationship or a career.

Having studied biology for years, Pilates instructor Annie Kirwan eventually progressed to a PhD, studying in a lab. “I remember two weeks before I started I had a gut feeling that I wasn’t too excited, even though everyone wanted to go do what I was doing, and I had a pretty prestigious scholarship. I was feeling a tingling of dread, but I completely ignored it, and kept going. I put my head down and was like, ‘This is part of the process. Not everyone enjoys their PhD, this is just what you do,’” she recalls now with a laugh. “I’d worked so hard to get there, and what I was doing in the lab – molecular immunology – was such important work and could lead to such amazing things. But day to day, I was miserable.”

Progressing successfully in a path in which many are also striving can make it harder to then screw your courage to the sticking place and say, “Yes, this is coveted by others, but it is not for me.” “I never really thought about what I wanted to do,” Annie reflects now. The recession made it even harder to contemplate leaving this secure career path. Several years into her PhD, she describes how she had lost her natural positivity, her ambition, even her hope about life in general.

“I really think I was lucky that I got so miserable, because when you are that low, you take action. When I look back on who I was and who I am now, the biggest difference is that I had a lot of boundaries on myself then,” Annie recalls. “‘I should do this. This is what I’m supposed to do.’ I really didn’t think too much outside those boundaries. Changing careers, you get a lot of freedom. What would I do? What can I do? When you’re at a dead end, you have to look in different directions.”

There was relief when she left, she says, but things got worse before they got better.

Because separating from anything that is a big part of our lives, even if it is no longer serving us, is painful. There is no point in pretending otherwise; positive vibes be damned.

Annie went travelling and came home broke. It was the midst of the recession, so jobs were scarce.

“The Leaving Cert results came out; it was eight years since I had sat mine, and I remember crying, wailing really – I think it might have been a panic attack – feeling like I had wasted eight years of my life.”

Annie sat down and made a list of what she would be doing if money or training were not an issue. She ended up doing a Pilates course, something that fed into her long-standing interest in health, fitness, talking to people, and the structure and wellbeing of our bodies. Annie now runs Reformation, a yoga and Reformer Pilates studio, with friend Lee Tracey.

“I’ve gotten really good at listening to my gut,” she says now. “If you sat down and really laid it out, you would probably never do it, because it’s just so scary. But my gut instinct was to do the studio. I thought, we’ll make it work, we’ll make it happen. It all happened very quickly, and we just had to run into it. Just keep running and don’t stop.”

It’s not just outside world expectations and perceptions we must contend with when breaking up with a part of our life. It is the pressures we put on ourselves about how things were meant to go. In a sense, you’re breaking up with a future you. “For me and for a lot of people, you’re letting go of an ideal that you had, of what your life would be like,” explains author and journalist Kate Gunn, whose book Untying the Knot: How to Consciously Uncouple in the Real World was written in the aftermath of her own divorce. “I had never envisioned myself as a single mum; I had pictured my life a hell of a lot differently. And so I had to let go of that future self.” Time, and the burgeoning awareness of her own strength, proved with every day she got through, helped with this acceptance, Kate reflects now.

In her book, she advises an attitude of compromise in coming to a successful co-parenting situation. “If you come out of a meeting at a stalemate, where you’re both not completely happy, then you’re somewhere close to meeting half way,” says Kate. “If you have kids, there’s no point in one person winning and the other being the loser.” It’s accepting that a resolution neither party is 100 per cent thrilled about is often the one that will work. Just the sort of realistic advice on life-after-break-up that gives the lie to the positivity-only brigade.

Breaking up is never easy. It’s daunting, and sometimes it can seem like it has made everything far worse. But if things have gone wrong, it is always worth it. Because they will get better.

“Separating from anything that is a big part of our lives, even if it is no longer serving us, is painful.”

How to Fall Apart by Liadán Hynes, a memoir about love, loss, break-ups and finding your way, published by Hachette Ireland in May, is available to pre-order now.