When I was reading through those journals, I remembered a book I’d bought during that time: The Breakup Bible: A Smart Woman’s Guide to Healing from a Breakup or Divorce.
I don’t remember much about the book anymore. I couldn’t tell you what most of the chapters were about or what the author ultimately believed the right way through a divorce looked like. What I do remember is how desperately I clung to it. At the time, it felt like a lifeline. Someone had gone through this before me and had somehow managed to organize the chaos into chapters. There was something comforting about that. My life felt completely disorganized, but here was a book telling me that there was, apparently, a process. Steps. A beginning, a middle, and eventually an end.
I wanted that.
I wanted someone to tell me what to do next.
Maybe that was part of why the thirty days of no contact appealed to me so much. It wasn’t just that I could stop talking to Mike. It was that there was a rule I could follow. Thirty days. I could count them. I could do it correctly. And if I did what the book told me to do, maybe I would get through this.
There was something almost seductive about having a process to follow when everything else in my life felt completely outside of my control.
The separation hadn’t been my decision. So much of what happened afterward wasn’t my decision either. I couldn’t control what Mike felt. I couldn’t control what he said or didn’t say. I couldn’t control whether he wanted to talk to me, whether he missed me, or whether eleven years together meant to him what they still meant to me.
But I could control thirty days.
I could decide not to call. Not to write. Not to look. Not to reach back.
And in those days, that felt like taking something back.
I was no longer waiting for Mike to decide what happened next. I was calling the shots. At least, that’s how it felt to me. If I could follow the rules closely enough, if I could make myself behave like someone who had moved on, then maybe I could decide what the story was going to be.
So I decided that was what I was going to do.
I went no contact. But, of course, I took it one step further.
I don’t remember whether the book actually recommended erasing every trace of the person from your life. I suspect it didn’t. But in my mind, if thirty days of no contact was supposed to help me move on, then surely removing every reminder of Mike had to be part of the plan.
So I deleted the entire text thread from all those years together. Every message. Gone.
I deleted every photograph on my phone that he appeared in. I removed our albums from Facebook. I deleted his number, and I think I even blocked him.
Then I changed my email address.
The old one was tied to our marriage—my first initial and his last name. I remember changing it and seeing my new signature at the bottom of an email: Allison Williams instead of Allison Nguyen.
Even that felt significant.
I wasn’t just changing an email address. I was removing the last visible evidence that I belonged to someone else.
I was all in.
No contact. No photographs. No text history. No shared albums. No phone number. No trace.
At the time, it felt like strength. Like I was finally taking control of the story instead of waiting for someone else to decide how it ended.
Thirty days gave me a structure.
Deleting everything gave me evidence.
And together they gave me something I hadn’t felt in a long time: the illusion that I was the one deciding what happened next.
I sent him an email letting him know that unless it had something to do with the divorce, insurance, or bills, I wouldn’t be responding to any further correspondence. Even the email sounded different. It was formal. Transactional. There wasn’t a trace of warmth left in it.
I don’t think I became transactional because I’d stopped loving him.
I became transactional because I needed to believe I had.
Somewhere in my mind I’d convinced myself that if I could strip every interaction of warmth—if I could reduce eleven years together to nothing more than emails about insurance, bank accounts, and paperwork—then maybe I’d finally be able to move on.
I needed the marriage to become paperwork because paperwork didn’t hurt.
Paperwork didn’t ask questions.
Paperwork didn’t leave me wondering whether I had imagined eleven years of intimacy or whether any of it still mattered to the person on the other side of the email.
I could deal with a bill. I could deal with an insurance form. I could deal with a signature.
I didn’t know what to do with everything else.
So I made everything else disappear.
I didn’t know another way.
-A
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