I'm Jen Klassen 

Part 2: Identity – The Unravelling

So, there I was, working for a big corporate company, hustling to sit at another table that wasn’t mine. I had a brand-new plan; scramble my way up the ladder and prove my worth — to myself and others.

My plan wasn’t completely misguided, though. Beneath my desire for success and financial independence was something I wasn’t yet ready to name. At the time, I couldn’t fully admit it even to myself, but I was quietly trying to build a backup plan in case I ever had the courage to leave my marriage.

Looking back, my ambition was a mask.

Last week, I wrote “seeing myself with complete honesty meant unravelling a life I’d spent decades building”.  My marriage was the unravelling that I fought hardest to stop. I knew that if I turned inward with real honesty, I would see truths I wasn’t ready to acknowledge.

For my entire life, my sense of worth came from external validation; a life that looked ‘perfect’ from the outside. Stability. ‘Well-behaved’ kids. Close family. Decades-long marriage. Financial achievement. Academic and career performance (both mine and the children’s).

These markers told me I was worthy and I was doing life right. Full disclosure: they also provided a quiet feeling of superior over those who couldn’t quite hold it all together like I could.

I had learned early to equate control with virtue.

Being good didn’t just earn me approval, it also separated me from the chaos I feared becoming. I learned early to hold myself together on the outside because inside everything else felt far from orderly and stable.

I’d been conditioned by both culture and the high-control religious system I’d grown up in to know exactly what it meant to be a well-behaved girl, and later, woman. Agreeable, capable, composed, sweet, quiet, small. My God, did I ever try, mostly unsuccessfully, to play quiet and small.

My later-in-life ambition was not only a mask, but also a quiet rebellion against the system that had required me to minimize myself in order to earn love and approval.

Even that rebellion, I can see now, still played by the patriarchal rules I’d been given.

Getting back to the back-up plan, let’s fast forward two years and two promotions later. I was still another two promotions away from earning a corporate seat, but I was on my way. More importantly, though, I had succeeded in securing a position that provided the financial independence I needed in order to leave my marriage. I could leave now. Nothing external was stopping me anymore.

I had built the exit.

Did I dare take off the mask and liberate the chaos I had spent my entire life avoiding? I stood at the threshold between who I had been and who I might become—and I stayed there for a long time.

This wasn’t a single decision. It was months of sleepless nights, bargaining, grief, and fear. I knew exactly how much I had to lose. It wasn’t just the loss of a marriage— this on its own I was more than ready to lose. It was the emotional upheaval for my kids. The ripple effect of a decision like this would be massive on our extended families and friends, and the communities we were a part of.  The weight of how people would perceive me was a heavy burden. Would they see me as selfish, as a failure? Would my kids resent me?

This decision was about more than fear versus courage. The opposite of courage is not only fear but also security. In leaving my marriage, I would be leaving everything I knew, everything sure and certain, all that was familiar. As a young woman of twenty years old, I’d gone from living with my parents to living with a husband. I’d always been ‘taken care of’ and although I’d spent most of my adult life dreaming about what it would be like to live on my own, the reality of taking this leap was terrifying.

Sue Monk Kidd says it well when she examines Dorothy’s call to her quest in The Wizard of OZ:

“When the cyclone struck, Aunt Em threw open a trap door in the floor and disappeared down a small, dark hole into the cellar, shouting for Dorothy to follow her. There’s always the risk that we’ll retreat into the security of the cellar rather than ride the cyclone to a new place.”

I was afraid of leaving and afraid of staying. But only one of those fears felt survivable.

And so, with that knowledge, I did what I needed to do. I did it scared, shaky, and imperfectly. I had the difficult but necessary conversations, and accepted the losses that might follow. I lost many of the things I spent my entire life building and began the slow, unfamiliar, and difficult work of finding my way back to myself.

And somehow, alongside all the loss, I felt relieved. I felt free.I had told the truth —the first of many— and I was liberated.

---

THE JOURNEY
By Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew what you had to do…and began
Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice—
Though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles.
“Mend my life” each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at
the very foundations,
Though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little as you left their voices behind,
The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,
And there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own,
That kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world,
Determined to do the only thing you could do—
Determined to save the only life you could save.