For Your Information, There's an Inflammation in my Tear Gland

Generally speaking, divorce isn't great for the ole self-esteem. Of course the quality of your experience depends entirely on your role in precipitating the dissolution. Forced to leave your spouse because you were finally worn down by the sheer weight of propositions from the opposite sex accumulating like a Biblical flood over the course of your marriage so that you spend your first night out of the marital bed four-deep in a quorum of flight attendants? I'd say your first problem is less self-esteem and more something that can be solved with an adequate supply of water-based industrial lubricant.

Find yourself on the other end, however--the brutally quiet conversation top-heavy with I-don't-know-that-I-ever-really-loved-you horseshit rationalizations and appeals to personal martyrdom--and it's possible for one to catch just a slight case of Total Collapse of the Ego.

Now, sure, the second option sounds way worse. I get that. But with the former, your whole sleep schedule is ruined, all your social circles are broken and you find yourself financially ruined in short order trying to keep up the pace of appletinis and Japanese microproceessored self-sucking condoms. If you're looking to eventuate a crisis of self-identity, spend a month or two living in a way completely foreign to you and every sensibility that has shaped your reality for what probably constitutes a goodly portion of your adult life.

On the other hand, spending four months confined to a six square foot portion of your own bed not only affords you rest, but just watch the savings pile up! Field the occasional call from mom or a sibling or the neighbor, just enough to keep the fire department from going battering-ram on your front door, and in relatively short order, you're looking at a tidy sum. Not Crazy Hermit money where really it's a marble, a length of unwaxed dental floss and a dead gypsy moth. We're talking actual shut-in money. Like Silas Marner money. And by that I mean, the retelling of its getting will likely be responsible for dozens of spontaneous suicides amongst American high school students.

I'm not arguing that rejected and alone is better. But it sure cuts out a lot of confusion. There is no wilderness except that which is self-imposed. Both approaches involve a fair amount of wallowing, the only difference being which of one's bodily fluids is involved. Alone time, I would argue, is a better approach for the rebuilding of personal character, understanding of the self as the self, outside the context of coupling (long-term or immediate/temporary). That kind of growing perspective, put together with alternating fistfuls of Zoloft and Ambien and everything will work out great, activated-charcoal willing.

But yeah, the flight attendant thing? Way better stories.