Widow vs Divorcee: Turning Personal Tragedies Into Collective Strength

Hey friends, guess what you are in for? A treat today, because I am doing my very first interview. Well, not really an interview, more of a conversation. I want to introduce you to my friend Josie. She is also a fellow podcaster and she has a podcast called the Heavy Pages Podcast. She talks about divorce. Today we are actually going to talk about the differences, or really truly the similarities, of a widow and a divorcee. So, josie, I'll let you go ahead and introduce yourself.

Well, hello, rebecca. Thank you so much. Hello everyone. Josie here yes, the host of Heavy Pages a separation journey. I have been divorced. I started a podcast to share my journal entries from my separation just to help other women dealing with their unwanted separation and struggling through that whole process. So that's how it all started, reading journal entries being a little bit cringy, putting it all out there for whoever it might possibly help. And so now we're on season four. I've changed the format a bit. I talk a little bit more about specific topics and have some guests come on also, and so that's what we do with my podcast, and thank you so much, rebecca, for having me here.

Oh no, thank you for doing it. Thank you for being my first interview.

Yeah, how exciting. I love it. That's going on my resume.

Oh well, this is definitely something new for me. So if I don't know you guys, you tell me if you like it or not. So we had a conversation the other week when we were talking about doing this collaboration, and boy, we should have been recording. That conversation is what we should have been recording, because it was so good. It was so good it started because you reached out. You'd listen to one of my episodes and then I listened to your recent episode and you were talking about weight loss and some other things and I just did a similar episode. So it was like we were on the same wavelength, but in the beginning I did not realize that it was a journal entry that you were reading. Oh, tell me, tell me how you came up with that idea. And then also the fact that you were journaling through your separation. I wish I would have known to do that after my husband had died.

Right, it's very powerful. It's very powerful. So I have always been someone who who journaled. I, when I was younger I would, I journaled, but I remember that I would. I had a folder and it said to on it and I felt like I was writing to God actually, and so I would write about how I felt about a lot of things and I had it like a conversation with him and it would always help me get stuff out of my head, things that I was thinking, stuff that I was feeling, and so I had stopped doing it, obviously many years ago. But when I went through my separation, the day that I moved out of my home, I sat down in front of the computer and I just started writing because I had so much to say, I had so many feelings, I was so angry, I was so hurt, there was so much that I was going to explode, and so I just put it down on on paper technically not paper, but I started typing it up and then I would go back to it every day because every day there was an emotion going on and this was kind of my release and it really, usually by the end of each journal entry I felt empowered because I was talking myself up. You know I was. I would share all the stuff and then I would talk myself up. So every time I would close the computer I felt really good for maybe you know five or six hours and then I might have to run back to it. But that was just a process that really helped me and I definitely recommend and suggest it to my listeners and everyone. Journaling even if it's not because of a big life event, but it's, it's very therapeutic. So that's where the journaling started from, or that's how I did it. I chose to do it during the separation, yeah.

And so now you have transitioned and it's a separation journey.

So yes, because actually the podcast used to be called a divorce journal, but the journal was my separation journal. I didn't get divorced until a couple years later. So all of this that was happening was because of the separation. I used the term divorce and this is like one of those backend situations where, when I was starting my podcast, they were telling me I have to put a word that women are going to search for. So I was like, okay, divorce journal, but in reality it was my separation journal. By the time I was divorced I was writing about all sorts of other stuff that really wasn't what was going on with my, my breakup. So I wanted to be more authentic to what was really what it really was about. So it's actually my separation journal, but I'm calling it now my separate. The podcast is a separation journey because now it's more about since I've gone on to new seasons it's less about my journal entries and more about the women that are listening and the journey they are going through. So that's why it's a separate, heavy pages, a separation journey now. But that's where it started. It started from my journal entries.

So you just said something that I thought was very interesting. You said, by the time you were divorced, you were writing about something completely different. What does that mean?

Well, it means that I was not in the same headspace that I was when I started the journal for the purpose of the separation, so I used it for a good few years about anything that would. In the beginning it was all about my ex, what he was doing, how I was feeling, how I was going to survive, and then I made the terrible mistake of trying to date too soon and it became about just random. Nobody said. I have no idea where they are now, but an unnecessary amount of journal entries were focused on men that did not have any purpose in my life. But it is part of the process and so I read them because I promised when I started that I was going to read every journal entry. I was going to be as real as possible and some of them were super embarrassing, but I read them anyway. But by the time I was divorced it was about you know, oh, I'm going to go to the you know, on this cruise with my son and we're going to do this, and I did that. It very rarely had anything to do with the ex. It had moved on. It was now more about me and you know what I was really doing and enjoying in my life it was no longer about that really painful part.

I absolutely love that because I think that's where me and you are so similar. We both lost a husband. You know regardless if one is dead and one is alive. We lost a husband. So your podcast started with your journal pages, what you were going through, and then now you're in this completely different place. It's more about you and what you're going through in your listeners. It's about the journey itself. So it's not so much about being separated or being divorced. For me, with my podcast, it's the same thing. My podcast is not about my husband, it's about widows. It's about me, it's about us. It's about our journey that we're going through.

We're just so similar in that way yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, and that you know, that's kind of. That's kind of how I feel where it needs to come from. It needs to be about the journey and not the person, because a person could be kind of any person, but it's about you or the listener and the journey that they are going through. So I try not to you know when I would read a journal entry or when I would say and I would talk about what he did and I would be like it's not about what he did, this is not about him, this is about me and how I handled things or whatever. So I try and this is what I also tell you know, the women that I work with. It's like we have to put whatever he did and how he's doing and what he's living and all of that, that's that doesn't concern you. Our job is us and how we're going to move through this and how we're going to work through this. That is where the focus, that's where the focus is and that's how we help others by sharing that part of the journey.

And I like how you said that it's not his concern. So for a widow, the difference for me, I think, would be not so much as his concern because well, he's dead, but from a widow standpoint, maybe his family's concern or his friends' concerns.

Well, I have something to kind of say about this is you use his real name when you do your podcast?

Right and you don't. You don't use your ex's name?

No, because he's still around. He can listen, he can have an opinion, he can get upset. He could feel like I'm sharing his business, which I'm I'm not. He is part of my story and where I'm sharing my story obviously there's some intersection, but this is all from my perspective and stuff like that. But I still, out of courtesy and legal reasons though I'm not a lawyer I change names and I I don't share locations and things like that to avoid that. That's something that I don't know how you do for his family's sake, but for him you don't really have to worry about that and I bet it kind of honors him to use his name.

Yes, well, for me, because you know, I think when most people pass away, people tend not to use the person's name. You know they're like oh so your husband Tom his name was Tom, but I have been worried about a few things, that I have said some very personal things on the podcast, and I did have a conversation with my brother-in-law and I said, hey, just so you know I may say some things about Tom, and he looked at me. He said Tom was not perfect. He said and I knew him better than anyone. He said and I'm sure you're not gonna say something that wasn't true or probably stuff that people you know kind of don't already know he said whatever you want to say is completely up to you so that's, it would. That was kind of nice. That was kind of nice that is nice.

I actually I had avoided being very obvious about my podcast because I didn't want him to find out about it. I didn't put my face up there. Now you can find me everywhere, people, but before you didn't see my face, you didn't see I didn't use my name. But when I realized I really wanted to help women with this, I needed to be more out there and so the one thing I did was I reached out to his sister because we're still friends and you know, and I wanted her to know that I was doing this. I tried to tell him, but I had reached out one day and said, hey, can we talk? And he was like, oh, you know, he kind of blew me off and he didn't really want to talk right now and he wasn't in a good headspace and he felt like talking to me wasn't gonna help and I'm like, well, if you hear what I have to say, it's really not gonna help, so maybe we won't have this conversation. So I never said anything to him and I'm assuming up till this day he doesn't know that it exists. His sister wasn't gonna tell him, but I let her know then. After that I basically keep it to. I didn't like announce it to all my family and all my friends. This is more something that I created for others.

Right, it wasn't exactly for my family or my friends to be listening to, especially when I was gonna, you know, put it all out there, so that I felt was kind of a little bit different nice because I was very open with my podcast, okay, so we just did an interview for your podcast and one of the things that we talked about was well, I mean, you were asking me questions, so of course it was more my perspective. But so now I just kind of want to ask you more about your journey, finding yourself and figuring out who you are. So we talked about losing ourselves and we talked more specifically about me and my journey and how I had to learn to love myself and find myself again. Of course, my listeners, we can all relate in the way of a widow. I just want people to be able to see the similarities and not so much the differences. So just tell us about your journey after your separation, from the time that you separated until the time the divorce was final, how you found yourself changing.

Well, the interesting thing for me was that I felt like I was a very strong, independent woman before I met my husband, and my husband was my now ex-husband. He had a terrible life of bringing. He had a lot of problems with his family and whatever, and when I met him he needed saving. I felt that he needed saving and so he shared with me all of the terrible things that were happening in his life and I'm like, oh no, I'm going to save you from all of that and that was kind of my mission, because I had a job, I had money. When he moved over to be with me in our state, I got the apartment. I did all of these things Like I was handling it all. And then we have a child, we get married, I stay home, he becomes the breadwinner and slowly but surely I started losing myself. I was an extrovert. I love parties, I love going out. He loved to stay in. He was on the computer all the time. I stopped having people over. I started being like him. I started changing more and more to be who he was, the kind of person he was. He was moody. I started being moody and then one day he saw himself in me and he realized this is not what I want anymore. And I'm like but this wasn't who I was. I was a totally different person. But I changed. I lost myself. I became a mold of him. And then he's like oh, I want better for my life. So when we separated, I was a mess. I had lost all my self-worth, all my self-confidence. I was broke because I was a stay-at-home mom. I had nothing to fall back on. There was so many things that I needed to rebuild. It was difficult and when you listen to the podcast and hear the journal entries, I was desperate to get him back. And he doesn't know what he wants. He doesn't know what he's doing, because I didn't believe that I could do it again without him, even though I had been doing it without him before I met him. It was a process to remind myself of who I was. Okay, I had a son and I had to take care of my son. So it's like what am I going to do? I need a job. And I don't just want a job, I need to study. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to go back to school. And I went back to school and I sped through the courses that I took and finished earlier, and every one of those little steps made me feel better about myself and reminded myself that I can do this. And so it got to a point. I got my apartment. I got my dream car that I always wanted. It was a Mustang and it was used, but it was like my car that I was able to get approved for on my own, because one of the things that I made the huge mistake of when I was in the marriage was well, he works, I don't work. His credit is more important than my credit, and we made sure his credit was great. And then we didn't take care of mine. We didn't do anything for my. I had student loans, deferred, deferred, deferred for our entire marriage. So when we got out of this, not only did I not have money, I had zero credit, I had terrible credit because I was focusing so much on him, which, ladies, huge mistake, don't do that Right. So by the time I was divorced, we took two years, just because I wasn't in a hurry, he wasn't in a hurry and we were living separate lives. It was just a piece of paper, but by the time the divorce came, I was back to who I was before we met and a woman that could handle it and take care of herself, and so it was a process. It was a lot of hard work but I made it.

I see, gosh, just so many similarities in your story for just widows in general. Like finances, a lot of people don't want to talk about finances. You know we're embarrassed that income changes. You know not having two people, so we go through that. I really liked what you said about remembering who we were, and I even tried to remember who I was before I met Tom. Honestly, I'm not very impressed with who I was before Tom either, because that was with my son's father and well, that's a whole another podcast. That's a whole another podcast than divorce and widow. That's like a completely other podcast. I have to go back and think about who I was as a teenager and I don't think I was that strong then either. I think I like who I am now of all the versions of myself. How do you feel about that? Like who you are, all the different versions of who you were now when you were separated, when you were in your marriage and even before your marriage. Right, what version of yourself do you like now?

I think that I agree with you, that I think I like the version of me now because the version of me before I met my husband my now ex-husband I was again tough, determined, all of these things, but I was not aware of how I could allow, how I could lose myself, how I could wanna take care of somebody so much that I forget to take care of myself, how important it is to value yourself. And now that is a lesson that I don't ever need to relearn. I am clear on who I am and what my worth is and what my value is. I will not accept less for myself. I will make sure that the person that comes into my life and I'm not alone anymore. I do have a new partner, but I made sure to pay attention and make smarter choices because of what I've learned. So I would say the version of now, after the hard knocks and learning the lessons.

Everything that you just said. I am currently working on myself. So and you know, I don't think I'm quite there yet. I am still trying to figure out my worth, and I don't think that has anything to do with my marriage. I think that just has everything to do with my childhood and everything probably before Tom. But I need some work.

But I think it's something that you have to constantly remind yourself of. I don't think you ever get to. Oh, I have self-worth, I'm good. I think it's something that you always need to remind yourself of, is something you always have to be conscious of, because it's easy to start putting yourself behind, because we're good people, we care about other people, we care about other people's happinesses and things like that. It's not selfish, it's important, and you sometimes you just have to remind yourself I'm not doing this because I'm conceited or because I think I'm worth better than everybody else. I'm doing this to preserve the person I am, so that I can be the best person for me and for others. It's a work in progress, always. It's never. You never get to the end. You just continue to remind and work on that.

Yes, just constantly involving, constantly moving forward, just constantly putting yourself out there and just trying to make the change, willing to make the change.

One of the other things that you and I talked about which I always thought was when we were discussing the differences between widow and divorced. We were talking about some people say it's better right, you were talking about that that. Some say, oh, this one's better that one's better.

Some people say when someone who's divorced comes up to a widow and they're like, oh, I know exactly what you're going through, some widows get very defensive about that statement. I don't take offense to it, because one I divorced Tom and I was widowed from Tom. So I can honestly say that I think the divorce was worse because our circumstances were not the same. I mean, we were definitely having trouble in our first marriage. There was some issues in the second marriage, but in the first marriage there was a clear reason why we got divorced, which I'll probably never share, the reason why we got divorced. But when we did, it was hard because I had to watch him struggle and I had to watch him learn his lessons and I had to watch him figure out who he was. I always say we didn't divorce because we didn't love each other, but love doesn't always make a marriage. We obviously wanted different things, so we ended up divorcing. During our separations we learned from that and even though I did briefly marry someone else and quickly get divorced. But when we came back together it was a different kind of relationship. We were able to mend some things and I don't know, sometimes I think maybe that's why we were brought back together and then he passed away. But I feel better about him dying than divorcing. Yeah, that's interesting, but I also look at things way differently than other people and I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I get a little slack for how I feel. But you know what? I'm also being honest. Our marriage wasn't sunshine and rainbows. There were problems and I idolized him enough in our marriage and in his lifetime that I don't feel like I have to idolize him in death.

Wow, that's an interesting perspective on it for you to say that. I wanted to agree with you. I remember when we had our conversation and you mentioned the you know which one, that I kind of scoffed at the, of course divorce is worse, and then I was like wait a minute, rain yourself back in here. That's a total biased opinion because of what I've been through and I realized because you made a perfect point which was when we separated, when we divorced, I lost my husband, somebody I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, but my son still had his dad, his sister still had their brother, his parents still had their son. So this was a hurt for me, of course, but it didn't devastate the universe around me, my people around me. So I now think that probably being widowed would have been worse, because it wouldn't have just been me. Of course, my son was affected by the separation. His life changed in a separate, different way, but he didn't. He still saw his dad in a different type of way, not every single day, but you know, still plenty. His dad is still around. They can still have a relationship, they can keep building their relationship. So in that aspect, I never thought about it. I just thought about it'd be way easier for me if that man was off this earth and I didn't have to wonder if he's out dancing salsa with some chick or whatever you know. But that is a completely selfish way of seeing it, I think. So I don't know. I think what we ended up with there's no better or worse. Each one of them have their, you know. I mean, I don't know if anyone have. Either of them have pros, they both have a lot of cons, and so it's probably just not a question that can be answered. I don't know. What do you think?

I don't know. I feel like, wow, we keep bringing up these good points that we could just go back and forth and debate, because you're like, if he was dead I wouldn't have to worry about him salsaing with someone. But if Tom was alive and we weren't together and he's out dancing with someone, I'm going to be more hurt, right, because I'm seeing him move on without me.

Right.

Maybe it's a little selfish of a widow to say at least he's dead and he's not moving on without me. You see how we could? just we can constantly spin these things around and around and look at all these different perspectives, and I think it's just all about perspective. I think it's about looking, just trying to look at something from someone else's point of view, or not just someone's point of view, just a different point of view. Right, because there is so many different perspectives. Just like what we're saying today. We may know what we mean when we say it, but how someone else listens to it and hears it is going to be a totally different perspective. So I may change some minds about some widows, about divorce. Right, I may get some backlash from widows about divorce, but also, having you on here telling your side and your journey and your perspective, people can hopefully see the similarities and not just the differences.

Absolutely, I agree, I absolutely agree. You made me think about definitely, you made me think about. I changed my mind, you changed my thought process on which would be better.

See, and you changed my thought process on it. Now we're both looking at it from other perspectives.

I love it.

Yeah, so is there anything else that you want to know about a widow, or is there anything else that you might want to share with the listeners? Because you know, as you mentioned before, my podcast, of course, is I'm a widow. You know it is for widows, but anyone can relate, anyone that's gone through grief and a loss, and it doesn't have to be from a partner or a spouse.

Right, Right, and I agree. I mean I obviously still have my ex out there salsa dancing, so but I find a lot I can relate to your podcast it is helpful to listen to. It doesn't just have to be that you have experienced a loss, it's just hearing about other perspectives. So I definitely appreciate you being open and sharing that with the world. You know, I'm glad that you decided to take the time and say you know what. I'm going to put my perspective out there because I think it's very valuable and I appreciate that it's out there and that I'm able to listen to it and that I have been able to meet you and chat with you and that you had me as your first interview on your podcast. So that's super cool.

Yeah, I'm so glad. All right, that is it. You guys, that is my very first interview. It was rough. I know that. Please don't hate me and keep tuning into the next episode, because, after all, love is not dead, Just my husband.