A personal essay on divorce, identity, and what happens when being chosen is no longer the center of your life — and how to begin rebuilding after loss.

When I was married, I felt chosen.

Not in some abstract romantic way. I mean it very literally: being chosen was the center of my life. It was the thing that made the days bearable. The thing that gave me strength when everything else was hard. The quiet knowledge that, no matter what else went wrong, I belonged somewhere.

Until I didn’t.

The beginning of the end wasn’t loud. It was small and practical and exhausting.

While I was still in college, before any of that happened, I told my wife I didn’t want another child until I had held a job for at least six months. We already had one kid. I needed something in my life to feel stable before we took on anything else.

I graduated in April. I got a job in June.

Our second son was born on August 2 — two or three months premature. He spent his first month in the hospital.

Which means the pregnancy had started back in February, months before I had any of the stability I was asking for.

At the time, when she told me it was fine and that she couldn’t get pregnant right now, I didn’t start doing math or thinking about methods or probabilities. I trusted her. I just wanted one small part of my life to feel steady.

Two months into that job, three months before I quit, we had our second and last child.

Something in me broke that day.

I loved that boy more than I knew how to express. I still do. He was beautiful and perfect and real in my arms. At the same time, I felt betrayed in a way I didn’t yet have language for. I was exhausted — not just tired, but worn thin by life, by stress, by the feeling that my needs were invisible and my trust had been used against me.

My father was dying. I was trying to hold a family together. I was trying to become a man who could survive.

We moved into a new place not long after. For a few weeks, while the walls were still bare and the rooms smelled like paint, the four of us would “chugga chugga choo choo” around the living room, pretending we were a train. I still see it when I close my eyes.

Then it got harder.

I managed to keep that job for two years. Then COVID came. Then the layoff. We barely made it to the next one. Somewhere in that stretch, I moved out of the bedroom. I started avoiding my family. I’d surface once or twice a day like a diver who couldn’t stay underwater anymore.

My oldest went to live with his grandmother.

My wife told me she wanted to explore dating. I didn’t fight it. I was too tired to fight anything.

She met someone online. They became what people who are alike usually become.

She started traveling to see her. Long stays. Canada. Around that time my ex decided she was gay — something she’d flirted with as a teenager, now finally coming into focus. The first year I watched the dogs. The second year I said I couldn’t. The third year she took my youngest with her — my oldest was already there — and then she told me she wasn’t ever coming back.

And suddenly, I wasn’t chosen by anyone anymore.

I don’t write this for sympathy. I write it because this moment — the moment when being chosen disappears from the center of your life — changes you in ways no one prepares you for. It leaves a vacuum. A quiet, heavy space where your old reasons for getting up no longer work.

That’s where this notebook begins.

Not with answers.
Not with advice.
Just with the honest work of figuring out what comes after being chosen.