Dawn Dais - The Sh!t No One Tells You About Divorce: A Guide to Breaking Up, Falling Apart, and Putting Yourself Back Together

Welcome to Your Meantime

In the beginning of my divorce, when everything had gone ass over teakettle and life felt very, very raw, my divorced friends would repeatedly assure me that everything would be okay. They were a few years ahead of me on their divorce timelines, and they knew from experience that things would eventually calm down. Theyd tell me, Just give it time, everything will be fine, you guys will be fine. Just give it time.

Id respond with, Yeah, thats great. But what the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime?

The meantime of divorce is brutal. Its the time between the end of your marriage and the beginning of feeling normal in the new version of your life. The meantime is the time required for that new version of life to feel worn in instead of ill-fittingly new.

The good news is, my friends were right, time did help, and everything did end up settling down into a comfortable new normal. The bad news is, there are no shortcuts through the meantime.

Trust me on that one, because I repeatedly tried (and failed) to speed up my meantime. I tried to MacGyver the broken parts back together, I tried just blaming everything on my ex, I tried putting my fingers in my ears, closing my eyes, and yelling, Everything is FINE! over and over again. Youll be shocked to learn that none of those strategies were successful.

Ive written this book for those of you still working through your meantime. Because I know how confusing and isolating and infuriating that time can be. I know how aggressively odd it is to keep moving through all of lifes responsibilities when your head and your heart and your entire friggin world feel like a snow globe that has been shaken up by a three year old on a sugar high.

I wanted to write a book to remind you that you are not crazy, you are not irrevocably damaged, you are just a human navigating a ridiculously complicated period of your life. Also, as I mentioned previously, you have some time to kill, so why not flip through a profanity-laced book about divorce while you wait for your snow globe to pull its shit together?

The book you hold in your hands is a pretty detailed account of my meantime. It is messy and raw, introspective and evolved, and everything in between. At times my words are enlightened, self-centered, shattered, crazy, appalling, and kind. And that is just a sampling of the myriad of emotions that are constantly swirling around during the meantime. What an exciting life experience!

I tried to be as honest as possible in writing this book, while still being conscious of the fact that I am writing in permanent ink about quite a few other people whose lives were exploded along with mine. It was a delicate dance that Im not sure I always pulled off, but I hope the end result is balanced and that our journey can provide a little camaraderie to others traveling a similar path.

In an effort to add to that camaraderie I chatted with a lot of other divorces over the past couple of years. I refer to these men and women as my Divorce Squad throughout the book, and Ive included their stories and opinions to expand upon mine. All their names have been changed, and I feel genuinely grateful that they all trusted me with their truth and vulnerability.

I would talk for hours with different members of my Divorce Squad, each of their stories varying wildly from each other and from my own. But no matter the details, there seemed to be a through line in all of our narratives, a universality to what it really feels like to have everything fall the fuck apart. There was an ease to our conversations because letting go of all pretense is pretty freeing when youve been pretending to hold it together for so long. Instead of the standard, Yeah, everything is totally fine, these conversations started with, It was not fine, and let me tell you all about it. From there, we were off and running.

These conversations inspired one of my favorite parts of this book. During each Divorce Squad chat, I would share that I was trying to get into the right headspace for writing, because I didnt think it would be appropriate to write an entire book with every chapter titled, Fuck You, You Fucking Fuck.