Mind Quake: Not a sci-fi story.

How one truth can explode your reality and make you question everything about your life.

I have no other words for something of this magnitude, which explodes into your life, devastates all in its path, unravelling memories, as you question everything you’ve ever known about your life up until that moment.

I have heard many versions: someone who discovers they’re adopted, or who they thought was their father isn’t, or that their sister is, in fact, their mother. All of them recognise the hollowing out of self, the utter confusion, the questioning of everything, like a tornado ripped through your reality, and everything you thought you knew and remembered was in shreds, or out of place. It feels like insanity. You feel like you can’t keep a grip on your own core, your identity, your beliefs. You may experience your own version.

In my case, it was a mind quake that exploded in my first marriage. I have never written about this before, or even really talked much about it. It feels like opening a barely healed wound, though it has been 16 years. But it is time.

We were best friends from teens and inseparable for 18 years. We had been through everything together: he had supported me through university, I had then worked long hours, often abroad, to support his growing success in a trance techno band. We lived in a caravan for 5 years to support his dreams and he gigged around Europe, released albums (and I was there with him). I nursed him out of alcoholism and then drug addiction. Then, he supported me as I became very ill, eventually being diagnosed with an auto-immune condition. I was forced to give up my career but was determined to find a way back, to live with the condition and thrive. He promised to look after me, that he would always be there for me. We were in our mid thirties by now and his music career was petering out. He still released records on compilations, he DJ’d regularly in small venues, but he was concentrating on a successful career in communications, a Director with hundreds working for him. We marked our 10th anniversary by getting remarried in Las Vegas. We had been accepted on an IVF program. He told me every day we were soul mates and he could not live without me. He left me funny notes in my books, telling me how much he loved me.

Then, one evening, whilst watching Masterchef, he turned to me and uttered three words that blew me apart:

“I’m leaving you.”

Just like that. No pre-emptive. There had been no arguments, not even bickering. No discussions, no mention of any issues, no warnings things had to change, the usual signs you might expect. It was like being punched in the face by a mountain.

He told me “I don’t want a sick wife. That’s not who I married. You should not have children, you would be incapable of being a good mother. My life is slipping away, I need to go back to my music career and I can’t, with you in tow.” Then he left.

There I sat, in a half-built house, still coming to terms with long-term illness, no income, no friends or family near (we had just moved areas) and no idea what had just happened.

I will skip the bits where I clawed my own face red raw in a cold bath, alone, or where I hugged by knees to my chest on the bathroom floor, rocking in freezing temperatures for hours, the cat beside me. Or the low point, where I ‘came to’ to find myself running up and down the street, frantically sobbing, at 4 in the morning, because the toilet was leaking everywhere and I just had no wits left to sort it out, and, well, I had simply lost my mind. I kept the split to myself for weeks, pretending to everyone he was still there, lying to friends and family. I did not want to believe it. I unravelled under a duvet, on the sofa. Tragic. Eventually the truth came out and I could not stop the full force of the quake. People asked why. They had all seen what I thought I had, a perfect team, a marriage to be jealous of. I had no answer.

I desperately raked over things, emailing and texting him to try and understand why.

Each time, his answers made it worse. He told me he had had an affair after 4 years of marriage, with a heroin addict who had then killed herself when he refused to leave me. This whilst I was working abroad and had fallen pregnant (a baby he persuaded me to abort because it would ruin his music career and we would have them later). I had had absolutely zero inkling of this affair. Nowadays I am furious he told me this. I never had to know about that. He told me then he said, because the guilt was killing him. Well, this new knowledge just caused a tsunami in my head. How had I not even suspected? What else had I missed? What kind of idiot was I?

Then he began to repeatedly tell me he had never really loved me. This the most devastating quake of all. It winded me every time. I could not breathe. But the notes? The daily declarations? The cards which told me how happy he was that he had me? The videos of us smiling and laughing? He told me he believed he loved me at the time but he was just fooling himself. My happy memories of us, the image I had held of us as soul mates, vanished into a chasm. I stared at phots of us smiling, laughing, the hilarious and loving notes we sent each other, and felt like I was looking at aliens, a parallel universe. The aftershocks rebounded through everything. I questioned everything about us, about him, about myself.

I lost him, his family and all our friends in one fell swoop. He begged me not to tell them things he had said and done. And I agreed. He forbade them to talk about him, which made any contact with them impossible. Would I have agreed to it today? I’m not sure I would. But I was still thinking he was having a moment, a crisis, he was suffering and eventually he would return to me.

He told me he didn’t want to lose me as his best friend. He phoned often to say how sad and lonely he was, crying. He was on a journey to ‘discover himself’, he didn’t want an ordinary life, working 9 to 5, married with kids, he was made for something more special.
Then I found out he was living with his secretary and one of those phone calls was when he was on a trip to Cyprus, with her.

I cut off contact. He asked for a divorce and I was very fair, with things split 52/48 my way (he was on a 6 figure salary, I was by then a student teacher on a tiny bursary). Nevertheless, he screamed abuse at me through the answer phone and via email. He called me ‘evil’ and ‘vicious’, because I insisted using a solicitor. He made me and the cat homeless at one point. I no longer recognised him. I moved on physically. I learned to cope with the illness and began work as a Primary School Teacher.

Emotionally, I was utterly lost. I did not trust my own judgement about anything. My memories of the previous18 years were a shifting kaleidoscope. Who was I? What did I want? It took me 5 years to even think about dating again. By then, I was over 40. By the time I met my wonderful second husband, it was too late for children. My first husband had married the secretary and had 2 children. He kept the same job and stopped all music. Learning those things was hard to bear.

I will also add that my first husband died at 44 of a brain tumour, leaving two young children. I genuinely felt very sorry for him and those he left behind. There was no malice left. No one understood my grief, they thought I should be happy. Of course I wasn’t. I grieved for my best friend of 18 years.

I am not bitter or angry nowadays, I have learned this is like drinking poison and hoping the other person dies. I turned to self-hypnosis, then meditation and mindfulness. I learned to forgive a weak man. To let go of what was and what could have been. And I learned to forgive myself, not to blame myself or call myself stupid for missing things or doing things wrong. I concentrate on thankfulness. I thank him for those happy memories (the ones I can grasp onto with certainty), and the lessons I learned.

I still struggle with those old memories. I can’t see them whole anymore. They are distorted, discoloured, they slide about. Now I have to think of the girl and woman I was as a separate person from me, someone that was naïve, trusting, unaware. The truth is the truth. He loved me. I got sick and he couldn’t handle it. Then he didn’t love me. He was weak and selfish. I forgive him. This quake had repercussions, but I have grown from it. I am stronger because of it.

I am grateful that I got to meet and live my life with my second husband. I have emerged as a writer. I always wrote, but there was only room for one creative to be nurtured in my first marriage. My second husband has allowed me to blossom. Of course I grieve for the child I never had but my second marriage brought me my two step sons, now grown, and I am forever grateful to have them in my life.

Mind quakes leave permanent damage but they can also leave the ground fertile for growth.

So, if you have suffered or are suffering from such a mind quake, I am truly sorry. I understand the utter devastation, the confusion. But, you will rise from this stronger. Learn to be thankful, even for the bitter lessons, learn to find forgiveness for people’s weaknesses and mistakes, and then you can rebuild yourself, better and happier.