Elis de Guerre

Everyone has their inner critic, the voice in your head that whispers all manner of terrible things:

You look fat in that outfit.

I am 27 years old, 10 months into my marriage, and have been separated from my husband for two weeks. Consider this a letter from the trenches of impending divorce.

While my estranged husband called me a “strong female lead,” and I occasionally joke about being “an independent woman who doesn't need a man,” I wish I could honestly say either of those statements felt true.

Undoing a marriage costs five times as much as it does to tie one up with a bow, and the paperwork is even longer. I've cried so hard I've thrown up my dinner in a municipal lot, exhausted myself with memories to the point where 7 p.m. seems like reasonable bedtime, and contemplated spending my wedding anniversary alternating between taking a pair of scissors or a lighter to my wedding dress.

I went to my first therapist when I was a teenager. My family was dysfunctional to the point of being non-functional. If a decision needed to be made about custody arrangements, my parents were incapable of making it without me. Instead, I was the mediator (and had been since I was a young child), speaking first to my father on the phone and then relaying the message to my mother.

The Kinsey Scale test labeled me a 2, or, "predominately heterosexual, but more than incidentally homosexual," one notch above "equally heterosexual and homosexual."

I have not been single during this time of year since 2005, my senior year of high school, and now, as a 27-year-old woman, I look into the next month or so of global celebration and see...nothing.

What I objected to was the genderization of feminism, the idea that women's rights have to be specifically prioritized. If the overall end goal is equality, why bring gender into the equation?

I wanted to keep people at a distance. I wanted sympathy and validation. I believed that I was inherently unworthy. However, lately, I’ve begun to change my mind — or rather, it’s started to change on its own.

Raise your hand if you feel like you want to make new friends as an adult, but have no idea how anymore. Oh, good. It’s not just me.