So, funny thing — I had someone tell me that three years seems like nothing.

Three years feels like forever ago.

Those reading this will realize that the 22nd marks the third anniversary of that fateful day, and it is an odd milestone. Three years ago on the 21st, I was putting together a new apartment and preparing to start a very uncertain new life. Little did I know that decision had already been made for me earlier that evening.

One of the things I spent a lot of time doing after everything happened was trying to figure out what it all meant. I also spent a lot of time self-medicating while trying to answer questions that were never going to have satisfying answers.

Why did it happen?
Did I do something wrong?
Could I have changed the outcome?

Those are the questions people ask when the only person who could answer them is gone.

Three years later, I can make assumptions based on things we learned afterward, but definitive answers are never coming. Eventually you realize that sometimes “it happened” is the only answer life is willing to provide.

I would say my life is better in many ways now, although completely different from anything I expected. The beginning of all of this ties directly into what I talked about in my previous post regarding self-medication.

Right or wrong, we are a society addicted to instant gratification. Maybe it started with MTV cutting attention spans down to four-minute intervals, and now we have evolved into a culture that expects immediate emotional relief with the speed of an internet search. We do not want to sit in therapy. We do not want to do painful emotional work. We want something immediate — a pill, a distraction, a substance, a shortcut, anything that turns the volume down right now.

Self-medication is often an attempt to avoid stigma. People do not want to be “someone on psychiatric medication.” They do not want to admit they are struggling. Ironically, the stigma attached to self-medication often becomes far worse than the thing they were trying to avoid in the first place.

We all think we can hide it until we cannot.

In my particular situation, I found something that gave immediate relief, and honestly, I thought I had discovered a solution. The problem was that I had not solved anything at all. I had simply stacked another problem on top of the original one.

That is the trap.

You find something that makes you feel better quickly, but “feeling better” and “healing” are not the same thing. One is temporary anesthesia. The other is work.

A lot of people trade one addiction for another. I have seen people leave substances behind and immerse themselves completely in religion. This is not a cheap shot at faith; it is simply another example of how human beings try to redirect pain into something that feels safer or more socially acceptable. Even religion can become self-medication if it is used solely to avoid confronting reality.

And before anyone says religion never has harmful outcomes, I only need to say one word:

Jonestown.

At the core of self-medication is the desire for something quick, private, and easy. Something that lets us avoid judgment. Unfortunately, the consequences of self-medication are often far uglier and more public than the original pain ever was.

I still occasionally wonder what would have happened if things had been different. But if I am honest with myself, I think our relationship was already ending regardless of whether we divorced or whether he did what he did.

There was grieving involved either way.

Not necessarily grieving the person by the end, but grieving a life I thought I was going to have. Grieving routines, plans, familiarity, history, and the version of the relationship that existed long before things became unhealthy.

Because the truth is that, by the last eighteen months of the marriage, it had become easier and easier to walk away.

For two people who were once very happy — and I mean the very beginning — the ending was not happy at all. In fact, things had deteriorated so badly that even the good memories sometimes feel almost mythical now, like stories that happened to entirely different people.

That realization is uncomfortable because society likes clean grief narratives. People prefer stories where death automatically sanctifies someone and rewrites complicated history into something softer and easier to digest.

Real life does not work that way.

Sometimes you grieve a person while simultaneously recognizing they hurt you. Sometimes you mourn the collapse of a life more than the individual themselves. Sometimes relief and sadness coexist in the exact same space, and that makes people uncomfortable because it refuses to fit neatly into a greeting card version of loss.

The unhealthy coping mechanisms that followed all of this were part of trying to outrun those contradictions. I looked for solutions and chose the wrong one because it was faster — or at least it seemed faster at the time.

We all know how that played out over the next three years.

Karma can be a bitch sometimes.

Still, when I look back now, despite everything that happened as a consequence of his actions and my own responses to them, I cannot help but realize I am in a better place than I was then.

That does not mean everything is magically healed. It simply means I finally understand that surviving something and learning from it are not the same as romanticizing it.

I am moving forward now — slowly, deliberately, and with far more honesty than I had before. I am doing the work necessary to remain independent and rehabilitate my body after multiple strokes. I am beginning to question whether endlessly reflecting on the past is productive anymore.

Reflection has value when it provides insight.

But eventually there comes a point where revisiting the same ruins over and over again stops being reflection and starts becoming residency.

I do not think I need any more answers.

Long behind me are the days of constantly asking why it happened. I have accepted that it happened, and strangely enough, that has become enough of an answer.

At this point, I want to focus on whatever future I have left. I cannot fix the past. Regretting it endlessly does not change it. There is very little left to analyze that has not already been dissected repeatedly over the last three years.

What I can do is move forward.

And honestly, I think that is what my dog and my mom would want from me anyway.