My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
After the Divorce, I Met Myself Again
By Christine, 39 — Tampa, FL
The first night I slept alone in the apartment, I left every light on. Not because I was scared of the dark — I’m a grown woman, a nurse who’s held people’s hands through far worse than an empty bedroom — but because the quiet felt too big. The bed was new. The sheets were new. The nightstand had nothing on it except my phone and a glass of water. I lay there on my back, arms at my sides like I was waiting for someone to take my vitals, and I thought: I have no idea who I am right now.
I was married for eleven years. That’s not a small number. That’s a third of my life, the entire span of my thirties mapped onto someone else’s schedule, someone else’s moods, someone else’s version of who I was supposed to be. Kevin wasn’t a bad person. I want to be clear about that. He wasn’t cruel. He was just — absent. And at some point, I became absent too. I stopped buying the lotion I liked because he said it smelled too sweet. I stopped reading before bed because the lamp bothered him. I stopped reaching for him in the dark because I’d been turned away enough times that my body learned not to ask.
When we finally said it out loud — this isn’t working, is it — I felt relief and terror in equal measure. Like jumping off a dock into water you can’t see the bottom of. You know you can swim. You just don’t remember the last time you tried.
The Shape of Empty
The first few weeks were logistical. Forwarding mail. Splitting the streaming accounts. Telling my mother, who cried harder than I did. Telling the nurses at work, who hugged me in the break room and brought me leftover casseroles like someone had died. In a way, someone had. The version of me that existed inside that marriage — quiet, accommodating, always slightly tired — she was gone. And the person left standing didn’t have a shape yet.
I worked nights that first month, mostly on purpose. It was easier to be busy at 3 a.m. than to be alone at 3 a.m. I’d come home at seven in the morning, shower, eat cereal standing at the counter, and sleep until two in the afternoon. I didn’t cook. I didn’t call friends. I didn’t do anything that required me to have preferences, because I wasn’t sure I had any.
My friend Danielle noticed before I did. She came over one Saturday with wine and takeout and sat on my couch and looked around the apartment and said, “Christine, where are your things?” I looked around too. She was right. The place looked like a hotel. There was nothing on the walls, nothing on the shelves, nothing that said a specific person lived here. I’d moved in three weeks earlier and hadn’t unpacked a single box that wasn’t strictly necessary.
“I don’t know what my things are anymore,” I said. And I meant it.
Small Acts of Choosing
Danielle made me a list. She wrote it on the back of a napkin from the Thai place. It said: Buy something that smells good. Hang one picture. Sleep in the middle of the bed.
I laughed, but I kept the napkin. And the next day, on my way home from a twelve-hour shift, I stopped at the store and bought a candle that smelled like cedar and vanilla. It was small. It cost nine dollars. I lit it on the kitchen counter and sat in the chair across from it and watched the flame for a while, and something in my chest loosened just slightly. Like a drawer that had been stuck was starting to give.
That week, I bought the lotion Kevin hated. The sweet one, with almond and honey. I put it on after my shower and stood in front of the bathroom mirror and just — looked. At my body. At my arms, which are strong from turning patients. At my stomach, which is soft and carries the particular history of a woman who has lived and eaten and sometimes skipped the gym and doesn’t owe anyone an apology for any of it. I hadn’t really looked at myself in years. Not like that. Not with any kind of gentleness.
I slept in the middle of the bed that night. I spread out like a starfish, which felt ridiculous and wonderful. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and lay there in the dark — no lights this time — and noticed that the quiet didn’t feel so big anymore. It felt like mine.
Something Shifted
I don’t remember the exact night it happened, but it was sometime in March, maybe six weeks after I moved in. I’d had a brutal shift — a patient coded, we got him back, but the adrenaline doesn’t leave your body just because you clock out. I came home wired and exhausted at the same time, that particular kind of tired where your bones ache but your mind won’t stop replaying the sound of the monitor alarm.
I took a shower. Long and hot, the kind that fogs up the whole apartment. I put on the almond lotion. I lit the cedar candle. I got into bed, and for the first time in months — maybe years — I let myself just be in my body. Not performing for anyone. Not wondering if I was too loud or too slow or too much. Just me, in the quiet, paying attention to what I actually felt.
I’d ordered something from HiMoment a few weeks earlier. Danielle had mentioned it, casually, over wine, the way you mention a restaurant you like. No big pitch, just: “I have one, it’s nice, you might like it.” It had been sitting in the nightstand drawer since it arrived. That night, I took it out. And what I want to say about that isn’t about the object itself, but about the fact that I chose it. That I’d gone online and looked at options and picked one based on what I thought I might want — not what someone else preferred, not what was expected, not what was easiest. It was a small, private act of choosing, and that mattered more to me than anything that happened after.
Afterward, I lay in bed and cried. Not sad crying. The other kind. The kind where your body finally lets go of something it’s been holding so tightly you forgot it was there. I cried because I was alone and it was okay. I cried because I’d spent a decade forgetting that I had desires and preferences that were just mine, and here I was, at thirty-nine, in a half-furnished apartment in Tampa, figuring it out like a stranger learning her own language.
The Napkin List
After that night, I started doing other things on Danielle’s napkin list — and things that weren’t on it. I hung a print on the living room wall, a Georgia O’Keeffe sky that I’d always loved and Kevin thought was boring. I bought a set of blue ceramic bowls because I liked the weight of them in my hands. I started reading again before bed — actual books, with the lamp on, because nobody was there to be bothered by it.
I went on a date in April. A man from the hospital, a respiratory therapist named James. We had dinner at a place on the waterfront and he asked me what I liked to do for fun and I had an answer. I said I liked reading and candles and long showers and walking the Bayshore Boulevard in the early morning when the air still smells like salt and everything is quiet. He said that sounded like a good life. I said, “I’m working on it.”
The date was fine. James was fine. But what I remember most about that night isn’t him — it’s coming home afterward and not feeling empty. The apartment had my things in it now. The candle on the counter, the books on the nightstand, the blue bowls in the kitchen. It looked like someone specific lived there. It looked like me.
What I Know Now
I’m not going to tell you that divorce is a gift or that everything happens for a reason. Some nights are still hard. Some mornings I wake up and the bed feels too big and the quiet feels like something I’m drowning in rather than swimming through. Last Tuesday I found one of Kevin’s socks behind the dryer and I sat on the laundry room floor for ten minutes holding it, not because I missed him exactly, but because I missed the certainty of being someone’s wife, of having a role that other people understood.
But here’s what I know now that I didn’t know seven months ago: I am a person with needs and preferences and desires that belong to me. That sounds so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to type, but I think a lot of women lose that somewhere. We accommodate. We adjust. We turn down our own volume until we forget we were ever loud. And then one day the marriage ends or the kids leave or the job disappears and we’re standing in an empty room wondering who we are without the context we built our lives around.
I’m thirty-nine. I work nights. I live alone in an apartment with blue bowls and a cedar candle and a nightstand drawer that holds, among other things, evidence of my own choosing. The fifteen minutes before I fall asleep are mine now. I protect them like something precious, because they are. Not because anything extraordinary happens in them, but because I’m present for them. I’m there, in my body, in the quiet, not performing or accommodating or waiting to be told who to be.
The napkin from the Thai place is still on my fridge. Danielle’s handwriting, slightly smudged: Buy something that smells good. Hang one picture. Sleep in the middle of the bed. I’ve done all three. I’ve done more than that. I’m not starting over. I’m starting. That’s different. That’s enough.
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