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Last night I was chatting with a friend about divorce. We talked about what a difficult process it was to go through, how it affects your subsequent relationships and the “rebound relationship.” Suddenly a whole flood of memories came back, and I couldn’t sleep as the ghosts of the past came to visit. You see, my first post-divorce “rebound relationship” was one of the most profound experiences of my life, and one of the most shameful. Because I totally, inexcusably, went batshit crazy on him.

I thought a couple of months was all I needed to recover from an amicable but stressful divorce. We were of a similar religious background, lived within a reasonable distance of each other and both had a taste for all things geeky. It wasn’t a good fit from the start, for although he seemed handsome, chivalrous and stable, we felt like buddies rather than lovers. But life is weird and takes us strange places. Knowing it was a bad idea, we still spent a rather amazing night together, and then a few more nights after that.

Then, as they say in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, I dropped my basket. I did all the crazy stalkerish things you despise in other women and never think that you would do. I did the gajillion phone calls, the frantic voice mails, the angry e-mails, the hysteria, the melodramatics and just about everything but slashing his tires. Maybe he wasn’t as innocent and gentlemanly as my memory paints him, but he was a rational saint in comparison to my behavior.

While looking back I can understand why I went crazy, there’s no excuse for it. Bad behavior is bad behavior. Had I a Pagan mentor, they likely could have helped me navigate that turbulent path in my life far more gracefully, but I was alone, rudderless, poor and terrified. I had a sort of mental breakdown. Although I hate it came at someone else’s expense, it’s likely one of the best things to ever happen to me.

There’s an old story, with many variations, that says if you spend the night on a fairy mound in the morning you will be dead, mad, or a poet. The story slyly hints that death might be the easiest of the three options, and that perhaps there’s only a hair’s difference between the latter two options. But maybe instead of options, they are a journey.

Divorce is a kind of death. Everything you had hoped and dreamed for in your marriage has died. I remember the judge asking me if the marriage was “irrevocably broken” and how that phrase stayed with me. What a final, definite phrase it is. It leaves you feeling hollow, despairing and dead inside. Irrevocably broken.

I considered taking Psyche as a Craft name years ago. I have always loved the story of Psyche and Eros. It’s the story both of an imperfect love that must be fought for and worked at, and also the story of the soul’s journey. Psyche was left by her parents to meet her certain death. What a terrible thing, to face your death in that way. To know when, where, how and why you are going to die, and to become resigned to it. To face it head on.

L'Amour et Psyché (Picot)

Yet Psyche didn’t die. Eros, the son of the Cyprian, rescued her and took her to his palace, where by any measure of sanity, Psyche lost her marbles. Living in a palace invisible to all other eyes with a husband she had never seen, Psyche had lost touch with all reality.* Having faced death, she took refuge in a nonsense world that made sense only to herself. She had found a fortress in this madness and was determined to hold onto to it. It’s no wonder Psyche’s sisters had a heart-to-heart with her. Psyche lit her candle, examined her love, and promptly all her illusions fled.

It was a long, hard road back to sanity, and a love that could withstand examination, for Psyche. Yet, in the end, it was worth it. She impressed the Gods, was granted immortality, was rejoined with her lover and gave birth to a daughter. From being the girl her parents were willing to sacrifice, to living on Mount Olympus with the God of Love, I’d say her life got better!

Temporary madness is a pretty reasonable reaction to facing death. In Bernard Cornwell’s Arthurian trilogy, Nimue must sustain three wounds and survive to attain the magical powers she desired. One of these wounds was to the mind, and she journeyed to the isle of the dead to achieve it. There she willingly went stark, raving mad. From absolute madness she crawled back to sanity, and she was a stronger, braver and more powerful woman for it.

Many of us have had some moment in our lives when we’ve faced a death of some sort and lost our grip. Yet afterwards, when we’ve genuinely had time to process and heal, it makes us better people, even if not poets. We don’t necessarily go through this process only once, but sometimes we face this cycle many times, and it hopefully gets easier each time this initiatory process cycles around.

For me, the death of my marriage and my temporary transformation into a psycho girlfriend really did turn me into a poet. In recalling this period of my life I’ve been going back through my poetry from that period. Some of it is decent. I kept writing long after my “rebound relationship” ended, and eventually the poetry became prose. And here I am today.

I make no excuses for my bad behavior. I should have handled myself better. But I am grateful for the transformative experience I went through. I was dead, mad and then a poet. That’s quite a journey, and one to treasure.

While I’ll never be a smooth operator, the experience did give me perspective for the relationships that followed my psychotic episode. Not only was I a better lover and partner, I was more honest about what I wanted and needed from a relationship.

Here’s a poem, from that turbulent and badly behaved period of my life. It’s not great, but it represents how I processed my experience through poetry:

Elements

You fly, fletched keenly,
thudding sure and sound to
your true mark.

Of eagles, flames and mountains
you are formed.

You are a spear striking true.

I ripple, eddying lightly,
swirling up and around
my true vision.

Of salmon, lakes and valleys
I am formed.

I am a river winding to the sea.

When facing a deep loss, may you give yourself room to go a little mad without harming anyone else, and become a better person for it.

And if he ever reads this, thank you for making me a writer, and sorry for the drama.

*I think this detail may be from C.S. Lewis’ Until We Have Faces rather than the classical myth.