Straight Up and Dirty

Last week was a leisurely one. Work was manageable and with no pressing deadlines I was able to breathe for a couple days. Best of all, I was finally able to pick up a book again.

I'd started photographer-blogger-writer Stephanie Klein's Straight Up and Dirty on my press trip two months ago and it had been decorating my bedside table since then. This time I opened it again and plowed through it in a matter of days.

In it, Klein takes us through what she thought was a perfect life - and her subsequent divorce with the man she married at 24. It's about her (failed) attempts to get over it by becoming a serial dater (despite her phone therapist's advice), the heart ache, the confusion, the hilariousness, nights of sex with wrong men, walking away from seemingly nice relationships and the fear of being alone. It's about finally realizing that no man can hold her happiness in his hands.

I connected.

“It still amazes me how fast everything important can be undone. In a phone call, a text message, an e-mail, an instant message conversation. Weddings that took months of planning can be called off. Engagements broken. A phone call to a moving company and real estate agent and you’re good as gone. Complicated relationships, where promises and truths were shared in dark theaters, through a bar with his hand on her back, in the backseat of cabs, in the rain when he shared his umbrella, can unbutton in a beat. It saddens me how a lifetime of promises that mean everything to us can be unraveled faster than something as trivial and maddening as fine tangled thread.”

When she wrote about one breakup, I felt her pain. The questions she asked herself were the very ones I'd wondered myself and I'm sure there are many who've been through the same. We invest and hope and think if we work really hard that everything else will fall into place. We're scared that if we let go of one person or thing, nothing else will come in to replace it. That we'll live out the rest of our lives empty, unfulfilled.

It's that fear of being alone that will have you grabbing for the convenient, the safe, just because it's there. Because it's easier than jumping into the dark. But how will you find what's right if you're hiding under what's wrong? Easier said than done, I know.

Klein's story was a wonderful read especially now as I've started filling my life again.

Image: harpercollins.com