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© 2004 Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen/King Features Syndicate

SURVIVING THE SHIPWRECK

Cara Wilson©1999

(From “Chicken Soup for the Single’s Soul”)

I folded up into a clump in the center of a sea of boxes, holding my knees tightly to my chest, and sobbed. This was a shipwreck of cosmic proportions. I had floundered from there to here, and I didn’t even know where “here” was. “There” was my beautiful old home in the Hollywood Hills, where I had been floating serenely with my husband, our two sons, a veritable ark of pets, tons of friends, laughter, holidays, theater, movies. That was my life. That was my anchor.

And now? Now I might as well have splashed down into the Bermuda Triangle, thousands of miles from my home. I had become a victim of the Holly-wood I had lived in: promised scripts of a lifelong marriage that didn’t happen and other women that did. I was thrashing in uncharted waters. My sons were grown and gone, and I was bankrupt and betrayed.

I came to shore in Northern California, an eerie desert island of mist, sea and forest. I rented a tiny basement apartment and surrounded myself with my two birds, two dogs and two cats — two of everything to weather this storm — but only one of me. I hadn’t been single since I was a child. I didn’t know anything about myself, but I did know that I couldn’t make it. I curled up in my apartment, drowning in sorrow, and waited to die.

To my shock, I kept my head above water. I endured getting a box of bank checks with only my name on them, grocery shopping for one, starting a sentence with “I” instead of “we,” circling “divorced” on job applications. When I survived those first waves of despair, I gained confidence to head into others.

I began dating — major uncharted waters — and found the strange creatures there humorous: the guy who assured me he was “one of the Great Ones” in his past life (maybe that explains why he was one of the Great Jerks this time around); the fiery Russian sculptor who loved his own body more than anything else; the vagabond carpenter who loved his dog more than anything else; the intense writer who loved his own words more than anything else; the radio producer tuned in to the hypochondriac channel who was too worried about dying to love; and the predatory Peter Pan, who preyed on a woman until she fell in love with him before he mad-dashed-it back to his pack of Lost Boys.

And there were some gentle, sweet men friends who held me up when I was tired, and many wonderful women friends who taught me the beauty of the female soul. Through all of them, I began to learn about myself: what I liked, what I didn’t, what I deserved.

I learned that I could support myself. I banquet-served at a huge Monterey hotel, freelanced articles for a Salinas hospital and sat in on surgeries. I wrote radio spots and worked for a security systems company. (Be careful what you pray for: I prayed for security and learned that God is very literal.) I helped an aging millionaire write his memoirs. I wrote a book.

I learned to love this sea that had first seemed so tempestuous. In fact, I began to enjoy the silence of being alone. At night, I lit candles in my new little cottage, breathed and surrendered myself to change, not to someone else’s script.

One day, out of the blue, a young man asked me if I was happy. The question, to which I would have answered a resounding “no” not long before, made me pause. And when I answered him, “Yes, I really am,” I knew that it was true. The stormy seas that had so deeply frightened me had also been my healing waters. As Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” I wasn’t divorced and drowning. I was delivered, and I had finally come up for air.