Where the River Flows is an honest, poetic, heartbreaking account of how my divorce catapulted me down a yearlong obsession to find the answer to the burning question I had every single day after my husband asked me for a divorce:
"Why?"
Was it my inability to show him love like he'd told me? Was it an old attachment wound, still unhealed and bubbling at the surface? Was it the sexual trauma I'd never resolved and carried into our marriage? Was it my very real and frequent urge to end my life?
Or was it him? Was it his lack of understanding for my mental illness? His lost patience for me as I tirelessly worked through old wounds in therapy? Stress from the yearlong motorcycle trip of his dreams that I vowed to go on, and did just after our wedding day?
As I spiraled myself around this question and fell deeper and deeper into a depression, as the binges became more intense and the purges returned for the first time in years, as the urges to die grew stronger and when I curled myself in a ball on the shower floor, banging my fists against my belly like I'd first done seventeen years before, I started to believe that what my husband said to me in our last few days together might be true:
"It's like there are three people in our marriage. You, me, and your Eating Disorder. And sometimes I think you love her more than me."
If you or someone you know has struggled with an Eating Disorder, sexual or developmental trauma, depression, anxiety, suicidal thinking, divorce, grief, then it is my hope you will find yourself and your loved ones in the pages of this memoir.
You are not alone.
