Five days ago, my husband boarded a bus in Cork bound for Dublin, and from there caught a flight to the United States.

Hence, the luggage.

With him went my path to citizenship, my plans for retirement in the EU, and the final threads of a thirty-one-year marriage. To be fair, the marriage had been failing for years. My husband's decision to go to Utah to care for his mother was actually a relief—an unexpected exit from an emotional prison I hadn't realized I was inhabiting.

You leveled up. The relationship didn’t. That’s not failure — that’s growth colliding with stagnation.

Chi represents life energy — the quiet force that moves through us, strengthens us, awakens us.
For much of my life, my chi was dimmed. I had lost connection to myself, my strength, and my inner voice.

What awaited me after the Camino was not peace.
It was the reckoning I had postponed for years.

Loving myself, though — that was harder. My sense of self had been deeply damaged. So there I was: away from home, sad, confused, and alone. All the ingredients for a mental health crisis.

At the crossroads. Learning to trust myself again. Reclaiming intuition, healing after emotional abuse, and finding peace in self-compassion.

The silent trauma of long marriages. This is the double wound of long marriages that end in betrayal: the loss of the partner, and the loss of faith in your own discernment. The trauma lingers and lingers. Immediately after my separation I was a mental mess — my brain was soup, I couldn’t hold a coherent thought, and I couldn’t stop crying.