They can annul your marriage, but they can’t annul your lessons

I recently I found out I was ‘never married’.

In the Catholic Church, an annulment granted is recognized as an “invalidation” of the marriage. The church will simply strike it from the record. Erase it like it was written in pencil in their ledgers. I don’t follow or affiliate with the church anymore. My ex-husband sought out an annulment of our marriage. Despite the church’s best efforts, I chose not to participate in the process. They went about gathering “evidence” from hand-picked witnesses of my ex-husband’s choosing. These witnesses were then interviewed along with himself regarding the entirety of our relationship, our personal lives dating back to childhood, the events leading up to the marriage, and the events preceding the dissolution of our partnership.

When I received the final paperwork summarizing the proceedings by the tribunal dictating the church’s decision to grant the annulment, I was quite surprised to see my words present in the summary. Someone had taken the time to sift through years-worth of posts I have made on my blog and my Instagram page to directly quote me in order to build a case for my “psychological incompetence” to marry.

The words I had painstakingly chosen to free myself from years of pent-up pain had in fact been weaponized against me by the church. Now if you want to talk about religious trauma, watch a massive organization that touts superior “morals” and “integrity” take your words, twist them, and spit out a diagnosis of you without ever having spoken a word to you. This doesn’t even breach the magnitude of what some individuals have experienced at the hands of religious organizations. Thankfully I have enough emotional distance from this part of my life to observe this experience without allowing it to cause more emotional harm. The same can’t be said for some men and women walking though similar experiences. To some children who grew up with the belief that because their parents had their marriage annulled, they were invalid and not recognized as existing in the eyes of the home they were taught to worship and feel safe in.

This annulment paperwork told me I apparently suffered from PTSD and a psychological anomaly causing a “grave defect of discretion of judgment”. What I will say is this: I married the perfect person at the perfect time. Without my marriage to him, I wouldn’t be standing here with the lessons, the clarity, the chutzbah, and the grit I now have. I learned what it was like to be more alone than I have ever felt inside the one union that a person is supposed to feel most surrounded in. I learned that, at the end of the day, it’s me. I am truly the only one who can provide a home inside myself with the foundation to be seen, loved, and understood. I learned that if I lay the ground work myself, I will never feel alone because belonging is an inside-job. I learned that if my own sovereignty is at odds with what is being preached around me, I can only stuff it down for so long. It will come up and demand to be reckoned with eventually. I learned that sometimes it’s not that the person you love won’t give you what you say you need, but that they simply cannot. I also learned that that is a more than good enough reason to walk away. I learned that no matter how many people around me vehemently disagree, that it is brave and beautiful to choose yourself first. I no longer care to be a vacuum of selflessness and call it “noble”.

And lastly, as I have learned most recently, the church actually has NO AUTHORITY over my sovereignty, and their judgment of my psychological and emotional landscape as established purely through here-say has no basis in my reality. I simply do not relate to that. They got only one thing right in their misguided grave-digging efforts into my mind and heart: that I did in fact demonstrate two grave defects in discretion of judgment. Not in my sanity or my cognitive ability to choose to enter into marriage, but my discretion about who I chose to be at that time in my life and who I chose to enter marriage with. My ex-husband knows in his heart of hearts that I was of sound mind and judgment entering into our marriage. He knows the promises we made to each other about the people we intended to uphold ourselves to be in our relationship. He knows where we both fell short of that, and he knows the ways we harmed each other leading up to our marriage.

Perhaps he, too, exhibited a grave defect in discretion of judgment in choosing me as his partner. I, too, made my fair share of mistakes in our relationship. I caused my fair share of harm. But he also knew the depths to which I required connection, transparency, emotional availability, vulnerability, and willingness to grow and evolve. His grave defect was choosing someone who required all of the things he knew he was unwilling to be vulnerable to in partnership.

As soon as I got real with myself and realized that he was incapable of showing up as a person I could feel safe to unpack my trauma with, I got the fuck out. Every person deserves to have a safe space to unpack their bags with. The church rationalized that because I had a history of trauma, I was unfit to choose to enter into marriage. I challenge them to find even one person who is married who doesn’t possess trauma. Our human experience is not about getting to the end unscathed by trauma. It’s about how we show up to witness it. How we hold space and grace for it. It’s about how we become one with the lessons and the truths of our experiences and let them move us towards our soul’s highest potential. We are HUMAN. We all have trauma. I will die on this hill. What the church failed to acknowledge is the fact that my sanity to choose to enter into marriage wasn’t my grave defect, but rather, it was my choice in who that was with.

My point is this. Nobody outside of you can accurately discern what your truth is. Others can attempt to take your words and manipulate them to the ends of the earth in service to their agenda, but nobody can take the power of your words from you unless you let them. As I sit here writing this, I still feel so much gratitude for the marriage I had. My marriage will always exist in mine and my ex-husband’s experiential history, even if it no longer exists in Catholic tribunal history. I’m grateful for the lessons I learned, my evolution of self since that time, and my willingness to speak openly about my trauma. They can use my words as kindling all they want, but the real power in my words, thoughts, and writing will always reside with me.

Big Love Y’all,

E.