Sometimes what I wanted from my lawyer was impossible—her assurance that I was justified in ending my marriage. She had given me no sign she felt this way, or that it was her job to feel any particular way about my marriage at all.

Still, sometimes I wanted to believe that in taking this case, she was somehow—like lawyers in the movies—fighting for my innocence. As if I needed to prove that my leaving was justified in order to deserve any kind of happiness.

In my heart, I knew there was no such thing as innocence. Only the choices I’d made, and the life I built in their shadow.

On Sunday afternoons, right after I dropped the baby with C, I went to a twelve-step meeting in a vinyl-sided clubhouse across the street from a sprawling cemetery. It was only women. The walls were hung with wooden whales painted with slogans. Feelings aren’t facts. One day at a time. Things I’d heard before. Things that didn’t help, until I woke in the middle of the night and needed them—not as a woman needs wisdom, but as a thirsty person needs water.

In that room, when I described my husband’s anger, my voice got hard and smooth as a shell. When I described the nights my daughter was away, it cracked in two. One piece of me said, It’s unbearable. The other piece said, It’s fine. Both pieces were lying. Nothing was fine, and nothing was unbearable.

The women sitting in that room were a loose net, holding pain but not absorbing it. They’d heard worse. They felt a grace that had nothing to do with getting everything they wanted. It was the grace of surviving things they hadn’t believed they could survive. The grace of one day at a time. The grace of washing stained coffeepots, cracking a bad joke in a dark time, putting one foot in front of another.

Some people called this grace recovery. Some people called it the love of strangers. Some people simply called it God.

The first time I got sober, I hated praying. It made me feel like a liar—full of greed rather than faith. I got on my knees and asked for things from a being I didn’t believe in.

The second time I got sober, I felt forgiven by prayer. It didn’t require belief. You could just get on your knees. You could do this anywhere. My bath mat became a church pew when I stared at shampoo bottles and tried to picture a force beyond my imagining. If I heard the word “God,” I pictured squinting at a nearly empty conditioner, thinking, Where are you?

Prayer didn’t require certainty. It could take root in all this wondering. It could take root in the honesty of wanting things. Years later, my sponsor told me I didn’t have to worry about asking God for the right things, carefully editing out all the requests that felt frivolous or selfish. Who did I think I was fooling, anyway? Might as well bring all my yearning.

How many times since her birth had I thought, I’d kill to be alone. How many times since the separation had I thought, I can’t stand to be without her. How many times, across the course of my life, had I wanted contradictory things from the universe and then convinced myself I could solve the contradiction by naming it?

In those early months of separation, my friends became my family. Or perhaps it was truer to say they always had been. I’d often been a creature turned like a compass needle toward the intoxication of falling in love. Even in sobriety. Especially in sobriety. But the weave of my everyday life had always been girls and women: bean stews and freeway commutes with my mother; a tight crew of girlfriends in high school, when I felt utterly invisible to the brash, cackling boys leaning against their SUVs in the parking lot; a college best friend with whom I stayed up until dawn drinking Diet Coke and arguing about God.

Romance was what I’d always felt most consumed by, but my relationships with women were the ones I’d trusted more. They built and rebuilt my inner architecture. The version of myself made possible by conversations with friends was the self I most readily recognized—the self that demanded the fewest contortions.

My close friends were not all versions of my mother. Each was no one but herself. But with all of them, I found a version of the safety my mother first introduced me to: You don’t have to keep earning me. I’m here.

Reading a biography of Susan Sontag that winter, I put three exclamation points in the margin next to a quote from her diaries: “I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.” It summoned the pattern Kyle had described. But what did this pattern mean? Why did I keep pursuing these thresholds, even as I told myself I wanted something else? Maybe every rupture offered the chance to emerge as someone else, slightly altered, on the other side of each crisis.

Or maybe I wasn’t seeking what lay beyond each threshold but the experience of threshold-crossing itself. Maybe it was easier to keep living with the fantasy of stability glowing on the horizon, perpetually elusive, than it was to dwell inside the experience of stability itself—its vexations and claustrophobia, its permanence.

It seemed clear that C’s anger was protecting him from grief. It was like smacking your finger with a hammer to distract yourself from a migraine.

It took me longer to wonder if his anger was protecting me as well. Not in the obvious ways, of course. Being the object of his anger—silent and wide-eyed, fists white-knuckled and clenched—made me vigilant all the time, my shoulders hunched around my neck. But his anger saved me from looking directly at his pain, which would have been like staring at the sun.

More than anything, his anger buffered me from doubt. The angrier he got, the harder it became to imagine another version of my life in which I’d stayed.

Sometimes I counted the men of my past like rosary beads. He loved me. He wanted to sleep with me. Even just, he looked at me. Even just, I came into being, for a moment, because I was visible to him. It was as if I’d won by making these men want me. But what game? For what prize?

After leaving my marriage, I felt—for the first time—such deep shame when I told people that I’d been the one to end it. I felt no safety, or power, in being the one who’d left. For many months I was like a deer frozen in the middle of a field, holding perfectly still. And when I stopped being a scared animal and looked around, I saw nothing but open winter fields, bleak and withered, full of all the pain we’d made.

It would be simpler if conviction burned away everything else. But it doesn’t make consequences disappear; it just straightens your spine when you force yourself to look at them. Over time I came to wonder if my shame was actually just sorrow in disguise. My divorce was slowly teaching me that grief did not have to wear the clothes of guilt.

She wasn’t wrong. After she went to bed, I pulled out my computer. Often I read my students’ essays. Sometimes I got so tired I could feel the blood pulsing against the inside of my skull, but their minds were good company—their intelligence and humor, the details of their lives, their voices struggling to figure things out. It all felt like abundance, like crouching inside the fullness of the world.

Sometimes the world is heavy-handed like this: the straight hit of sex and the suitcases, the hobo tattoo on the ring finger, the stranger literally yelling, “Get out of the way!” The blaring marquee telling us which movie will play.

Except that’s the easy narrative. The truth was something more complicated. I liked his mind, his voice, the way he laughed. He woke up something still alive in me, ready to thaw.