I'm Jen Klassen 

Part 3: Coming Home, Chapter 1: Beginning

Reflecting on those first weeks on my own, I always smile remembering those early feelings of freedom and liberation. I recall that felt sense of lightness, the result of untangling myself from a life that no longer fit.

And I can also recognize how, at the time, I saw myself as a butterfly unfurling her wings after years in a dark cocoon. With hindsight, however, I can appreciate what I couldn’t see then. The freedom and liberation I felt was not the emergence of a newly formed butterfly, but the relief of letting go of a life and identity that I’d clung to for so long; the ease of no longer holding together something that was broken. In walking away from my marriage, security, and the identity I’d shaped around the roles and structures that felt familiar, I was crossing the threshold into the cocoon.

Inside the cocoon is where I would learn to walk in the dark with no map to lead me home but the one I had to make for myself.

There is a temptation here to become prescriptive instead of taking the reader into the vulnerable spaces of my very flawed and human journey through the dark. How did I learn to find my way back to myself? I think the better, more honest question is:

How am I finding my way back?

So, there I was with no choice but to do the slow, unfamiliar, and awkward work of rebuilding a life and negotiating a new midlife single identity. My biggest priority in that first year was my young adult children. They were collateral damage, living the consequences of a life-altering decision made by the adults in their lives. There was a lot of grief in those early days and it couldn’t be rushed.

At the same time, we all experienced an exhale after what felt like years of holding our breath. Apparently, my quiet longing for a life outside of marriage, and the growing distance in my marital relationship was not the well-kept secret we’d thought it was. As I began the process of rebuilding my life, my kids were on a journey of their own; figuring out who they are as kids of divorced parents, and all of us working out who we were as a family now that everything was different. Me navigating the inevitable guilt that comes with putting your kids through the trauma of divorce.

I spent a lot of time in silence and stillness. I walked, wrote, and read a lot. I spent quality time with my children, my girlfriends, and alone. As the masks came off one-by-one my relationships became simpler, deeper, and more real. The unmasked version of me was easier for people to relate to and made it easier for others to show up the same.

In the stillness, I learned that my nervous system didn’t operate at a regulated state. Ever.

Instead, what I thought to be a ‘normal’ state of being, thinking, and feeling, was actually a constant state of hyper-vigilance, stress, and anxiety. It’s like turning off the overhead fan that’s been humming in the background for years. You don’t realize how loud and disruptive it is until it finally goes quiet and suddenly you understand exactly why it felt like you were going crazy.

I was determined not to take any of my old patterns into my new life and this required a level of unflinching self-honesty as I began to take responsibility for the ways I’d contributed to the relational dynamics I helped create and sustain.

The quiet and stillness provided the environment I needed to turn towards myself and reckon with the parts that no longer serve me.

With the support of great therapists, friends, and books, I started to understand how I used dysfunctional coping mechanisms to create a sense of safety, false as that safety was. As I learned to create a real, quiet, internal safety, I found I no longer need those old strategies.

Knowing this intellectually was one thing, living it in my body was another…and I am still learning.

I came face-to-face with the many ways I abandon myself and my needs in order to gain love, approval, and belonging. I examined how I participated in rendering myself powerless, a victim —or what I refer to as ‘The Handless Maiden’.

In the old folktale, The Handless Maiden is a young woman who loses her hands not through her own wrongdoing, but as the cost of loyalty, survival, and belonging. Dismembered and without hands—symbols of agency and choice—she wanders the world without the ability to act on her own behalf. She relies, instead, on goodness and compliance to stay safe. Only after she leaves the environment that required her to be handless do her hands slowly grow back. Her ability to act without betraying herself is restored.

Her capacity to take care for herself was there all along, she was just too busy waiting to be rescued to see it.

I spent time grieving all those past versions of myself too, and forgiving myself for not knowing what I didn’t know. At the same time, I felt daily gratitude that I am one of the lucky ones who managed to carve their way out of a life that didn’t fit. I come from a long line of women who ‘endure’, whatever the cost. We stay, follow, sacrifice, and disappear, and, somehow, I had managed to find the escape hatch and climb through it without having to carry that legacy forward any longer.

I walked 100 kilometers of the Camino De Santiago with two of my dearest friends followed by a few days in Portugal on my own. This trip changed me in profound and lasting ways. I learned that not only do I love solo travel, but I am capable of taking myself across the world and finding my way home again. I wouldn’t say I walked through Spain and Portugal; I glided through every forest path and cobblestone street, delighted by everyone and everything and I found that same delight reflected back to me by others. I met people from all over the world and I came alive in a way I’d never felt before. On that trip, my favorite hair tool broke and I had no choice but to set my wild, untamed, and unruly hair free; an outward symbol of what was beginning to take shape on the inside. After two weeks, I flew home feeling emancipated.

I was finding my way back to myself —an adult version I’d never met before. And I really liked her.

Slowly but surely and brick by brick, I was rebuilding my life from the inside out. These were early days and I still had a long way to go, but I was gaining steady confidence in my ability to navigate a new and unfamiliar terrain with nothing but my inner compass to guide me home.