veils
At different points in the writing process, my memoir had three different prologues — and every time, the prologue was the only part of the book that I was sure that I liked.
By the time it was published, there were zero prologues. Which, to me, is the right choice for the finished book’s structure, and also hilariously ironic.
And so as I reflect on yet another September 28th, the chronological beginning of dear sister, I figured I’d share the original prologue. I still feel it embodies who I was and how I was growing when the police showed up at my door that morning.
prologue
Several Septembers ago, I sat alone in a one-room cabin in upstate New York, on a bed I was supposed to be sharing on a retreat with my husband. He wasn’t with me; he was home taking care of our 7-year-old son in the life I was momentarily escaping, a life that was slowly, quietly suffocating me.
I was close to home, a 20-minute drive at most. And I was in a familiar place—I worked full-time as a social media specialist at that retreat center, The Omega Institute, so I knew my way around the sprawling 350 acres of winding paths, gardens and woods. I had never stayed overnight as a guest, but I understood why people traveled across the world to come to Omega — to heal, to search, to steady their chattering minds and find an inner connection — and, at that moment, I needed some of that, too: A weekend alone, in nature, alone, in quiet, alone.
I had booked the retreat months in advance, intending it to be a new beginning for my husband and I and our 10-year relationship that was ripping at the seams, mostly because of his opiate dependency. I proposed that we spend the year “working on ourselves” (which, at the time, I really intended to mean that he was supposed to fix all of his problems), and then, in September, I would take an Omega workshop called “Transforming Codependency” while he took a workshop called “The 12 Steps of Buddhism.” We’d find each other in between sessions to, I don’t know, lay in a hammock down by the lake or drink coffee in the cafe. Or maybe, if we were really healthy, we’d be so un-enmeshed that we’d spend most of the weekend apart, only finding each other to sleep in the very bed I was now sitting on. I saw this getaway as a goal to work toward — for him to commit to his drug addiction recovery, and for us to find a new way forward.
And yet here I was, without him. Nothing had changed. Well, that’s not exactly true: I had changed. The hazy fog of delusion and self-doubt was lifting, and my sense of reality was shifting.
I had just turned 30 a few weeks before. I knew I couldn’t spend another decade living with the same half-truths and broken promises, waiting for his “in sickness” to end so I could breathe, so I could really live, again, in health. I knew the idea of taking joint Omega workshops was a joke — he was in the phase of selling our things behind my back for a drug habit he swore he didn’t have, and me? I didn’t need to sit in a group and share my feelings with strangers. I’d already spilled out my story, through tears and sobs, for years — in Al Anon circles, on my therapist’s couch, and through a series of heart-to-hearts with a friend who eventually told me, “It sounds like you already know what you want to do.”
Of course I knew. I knew my husband wasn’t just sharing my life, he was consuming it. I knew I was shrinking — I could feel myself wilting from the inside out. I knew it was time to let the marriage go. And even though I told myself I needed the weekend away to “figure it out,” what I really needed was to separate myself from the noise — from the other voices telling me what they needed, away from the distractions and justifications — and hear the truth I’d been ignoring. I needed to sit in the quiet and watch leaves and pine needles easily detach and fall to the ground, to watch unconcerned trees shed what they no longer needed for the next season.
I stepped out onto the cabin porch and breathed in. The ground was still damp from a downpour earlier that morning, but the sun was out now, brightening the earth. And in that moment, a series of truths flooded to the surface, clear and focused:
I love my partner but I don’t love being his partner.
I want him to be healthy, but this marriage is making me unhealthy.
I need space to heal.
And loudest of all: I need truth like I need fresh air.
I didn’t need to know what was next. I didn’t need to figure out how my truth would be received. I just needed to know and, for the first time, listen.
This, it turns out, was a monumental shift. Being married to an addict — which is to say, being married to someone who is wired to get his needs met at all costs and will create an alternate reality of lies and denial to do so — is to constantly question your own judgment, perspective, and sanity. Sometimes I had flashes of awareness — an undeniable realization that I was either going to mourn my husband’s life or our marriage, for instance — but all of my own conditioning, my own wiring, was to push those life-rocking thoughts away. It was easier to stay curled up in the comfortable layers of manipulated reality, to sink into its familiar fabric.
But once I heard the truth, I couldn’t unhear it. I could feel the change in my body — it felt like blurred vision coming into focus, like total alignment. It reminded me of something I had read by Elizabeth Lesser — one of my favorite authors, and also, coincidentally, the co-founder of Omega. This was her daily prayer:
“Remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and fears.”
Yes. It felt like a veil had lifted, revealing a crisper, more spacious existence. And talk about being intoxicated by my stories and fears — I had spent the better part of a decade building an online persona and writing profile around my “story” of being an inspirational young mom and a happy young wife. I called the Web site “Early Mama,” and it quickly grew into a community of younger moms — ranging in age from teens to late-20s — who felt insecure, embarrassed, and discouraged about their choice to have a baby earlier than they had expected, or their families wanted, or society deemed acceptable. Women who saw the negative reflected in cautionary TV plotlines and insensitive comments — implying that young relationships never last and young moms throw away their dreams and potential. Women who, like me, were desperate for positive examples. Together we highlighted all of the reasons we loved being “early mamas,” as I called us, and I regularly featured young moms who were in healthy relationships, had thriving careers, and provided proof that maybe, just maybe, our lives weren’t ruined.
At the heart of it all, of course, was my own life, which I had created an entire career out of sharing. During the heyday of “mom blogs” — when new mothers were congregating at online hubs by the millions — the idea of representing and celebrating young motherhood became an attractive niche. I had steady, well-paying writing gigs with parent-centered Web sites, and freelance bylines all over the Internet. I received hundreds of emails from young pregnant women all over the world — many of whom hadn’t told a soul their sacred secret — and I was able to avoid working on my own marital issues by doling out advice to others. I wasn’t just intoxicated by my stories, I was relying on my stories for income and self-worth.
And my fears — fear of failing at my marriage, fear of letting down the women who looked to me for hope, fear of doing irreversible damage to my sweet, sensitive child — further silenced the truth I didn’t want to hear. Too often I’d think, How can my marriage be falling apart when I started a Web site to prove young couples can have happy marriages? How can I inspire women when my life is such a mess?
Elizabeth’s prayer gave me clarity: If I wanted to remove the veils, I also had to dissolve the stories and fears. What I needed was truth, even if the truth was devastating. Even if it destroyed everything I built and hurt everyone I loved. Give me truth at any cost, I asked the quiet. Please. Please remove the veils.
Something in me kept repeating that phrase. I had a sinking feeling that there was something, or many somethings, I still wasn’t seeing around me. After all, the dynamic of my marriage was just a continuation of what I had practiced throughout my life — believing someone else’s more convenient version of reality, even when it didn’t match my own inner truth, until I no longer knew what I thought or felt or had even witnessed. My husband didn’t just lie to me; I actively believed him without question because I didn’t trust my own judgment. But I had had enough. What else wasn’t I seeing? What is true? What is real?
Please remove the veils.
Those words beat like a drum in the background as the fabric of my life swiftly unraveled — starting with my choice to come home from that retreat, pull my husband into our bedroom and cry out my most basic truth: I need space to heal. Physical space. When I was away for the weekend, I had a clear signal. But as soon as I walked back in the door — back into the familiar thick air — I felt fuzzy and agitated. It was as if our house was tuned to the wrong frequency, and a low-level static blocked me from hearing what I knew, blinded me from seeing what was right in front of me. When I wasn’t sharing a physical space with him — at the retreat, at work, or in the car, rage-crying into my steering wheel — the internal interference cleared.
The prayer followed me in the weeks that came after, as he moved out and spiraled into a self-destructive path beyond anything I could have foreseen. Without the protective veil of my delusion, the true nature of his addiction ravaged his body and threatened his life. Two head-on car accidents in the span of a month; a mysterious new stab wound on his abdomen, probably from something drug-related. He took out a credit card in my name and continuously siphoned money from my account (no matter how many times I changed PINs, passwords, and entire banks). He tracked my phone, stalking my movements. Finally a strange woman messaged me photos of my ex in her bed, along with money-related threats, and I hit my boundary. I filed a restraining order with the help of a local domestic violence agency. They assured me that just because my husband never left a bruise, never raised his voice or called me names, his behavior was abusive — especially since our separation — and I deserved protection.
I didn’t recognize him. He was colder, darker in the eyes.
Keep removing the veils.
It was the anchoring mantra that got me through the next few months when he told me he was having a baby with a different woman, a complete stranger to me — and it was this woman and this baby who made him want to be a better man. Suddenly my deepest wounds were revealed under layers and layers of vanishing veils: I was unlovable, unworthy, not chosen.
I started to crave the expanded perspective, even when it was blindingly painful at first. Because every single time, the hard revelations led to understanding and improvement. Every time, it felt like freedom.
Keep removing the veils.
And then exactly one year later, in September 2017, another veil was lifted, revealing a reality I truly didn’t want to see — but I had no choice.
Michelle Horton
***
Read more of my writing at my free Substack: wild purple flowers
By the time it was published, there were zero prologues. Which, to me, is the right choice for the finished book’s structure, and also hilariously ironic.
And so as I reflect on yet another September 28th, the chronological beginning of dear sister, I figured I’d share the original prologue. I still feel it embodies who I was and how I was growing when the police showed up at my door that morning.
prologue
Several Septembers ago, I sat alone in a one-room cabin in upstate New York, on a bed I was supposed to be sharing on a retreat with my husband. He wasn’t with me; he was home taking care of our 7-year-old son in the life I was momentarily escaping, a life that was slowly, quietly suffocating me.
I was close to home, a 20-minute drive at most. And I was in a familiar place—I worked full-time as a social media specialist at that retreat center, The Omega Institute, so I knew my way around the sprawling 350 acres of winding paths, gardens and woods. I had never stayed overnight as a guest, but I understood why people traveled across the world to come to Omega — to heal, to search, to steady their chattering minds and find an inner connection — and, at that moment, I needed some of that, too: A weekend alone, in nature, alone, in quiet, alone.
I had booked the retreat months in advance, intending it to be a new beginning for my husband and I and our 10-year relationship that was ripping at the seams, mostly because of his opiate dependency. I proposed that we spend the year “working on ourselves” (which, at the time, I really intended to mean that he was supposed to fix all of his problems), and then, in September, I would take an Omega workshop called “Transforming Codependency” while he took a workshop called “The 12 Steps of Buddhism.” We’d find each other in between sessions to, I don’t know, lay in a hammock down by the lake or drink coffee in the cafe. Or maybe, if we were really healthy, we’d be so un-enmeshed that we’d spend most of the weekend apart, only finding each other to sleep in the very bed I was now sitting on. I saw this getaway as a goal to work toward — for him to commit to his drug addiction recovery, and for us to find a new way forward.
And yet here I was, without him. Nothing had changed. Well, that’s not exactly true: I had changed. The hazy fog of delusion and self-doubt was lifting, and my sense of reality was shifting.
I had just turned 30 a few weeks before. I knew I couldn’t spend another decade living with the same half-truths and broken promises, waiting for his “in sickness” to end so I could breathe, so I could really live, again, in health. I knew the idea of taking joint Omega workshops was a joke — he was in the phase of selling our things behind my back for a drug habit he swore he didn’t have, and me? I didn’t need to sit in a group and share my feelings with strangers. I’d already spilled out my story, through tears and sobs, for years — in Al Anon circles, on my therapist’s couch, and through a series of heart-to-hearts with a friend who eventually told me, “It sounds like you already know what you want to do.”
Of course I knew. I knew my husband wasn’t just sharing my life, he was consuming it. I knew I was shrinking — I could feel myself wilting from the inside out. I knew it was time to let the marriage go. And even though I told myself I needed the weekend away to “figure it out,” what I really needed was to separate myself from the noise — from the other voices telling me what they needed, away from the distractions and justifications — and hear the truth I’d been ignoring. I needed to sit in the quiet and watch leaves and pine needles easily detach and fall to the ground, to watch unconcerned trees shed what they no longer needed for the next season.
I stepped out onto the cabin porch and breathed in. The ground was still damp from a downpour earlier that morning, but the sun was out now, brightening the earth. And in that moment, a series of truths flooded to the surface, clear and focused:
I love my partner but I don’t love being his partner.
I want him to be healthy, but this marriage is making me unhealthy.
I need space to heal.
And loudest of all: I need truth like I need fresh air.
I didn’t need to know what was next. I didn’t need to figure out how my truth would be received. I just needed to know and, for the first time, listen.
This, it turns out, was a monumental shift. Being married to an addict — which is to say, being married to someone who is wired to get his needs met at all costs and will create an alternate reality of lies and denial to do so — is to constantly question your own judgment, perspective, and sanity. Sometimes I had flashes of awareness — an undeniable realization that I was either going to mourn my husband’s life or our marriage, for instance — but all of my own conditioning, my own wiring, was to push those life-rocking thoughts away. It was easier to stay curled up in the comfortable layers of manipulated reality, to sink into its familiar fabric.
But once I heard the truth, I couldn’t unhear it. I could feel the change in my body — it felt like blurred vision coming into focus, like total alignment. It reminded me of something I had read by Elizabeth Lesser — one of my favorite authors, and also, coincidentally, the co-founder of Omega. This was her daily prayer:
“Remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and fears.”
Yes. It felt like a veil had lifted, revealing a crisper, more spacious existence. And talk about being intoxicated by my stories and fears — I had spent the better part of a decade building an online persona and writing profile around my “story” of being an inspirational young mom and a happy young wife. I called the Web site “Early Mama,” and it quickly grew into a community of younger moms — ranging in age from teens to late-20s — who felt insecure, embarrassed, and discouraged about their choice to have a baby earlier than they had expected, or their families wanted, or society deemed acceptable. Women who saw the negative reflected in cautionary TV plotlines and insensitive comments — implying that young relationships never last and young moms throw away their dreams and potential. Women who, like me, were desperate for positive examples. Together we highlighted all of the reasons we loved being “early mamas,” as I called us, and I regularly featured young moms who were in healthy relationships, had thriving careers, and provided proof that maybe, just maybe, our lives weren’t ruined.
At the heart of it all, of course, was my own life, which I had created an entire career out of sharing. During the heyday of “mom blogs” — when new mothers were congregating at online hubs by the millions — the idea of representing and celebrating young motherhood became an attractive niche. I had steady, well-paying writing gigs with parent-centered Web sites, and freelance bylines all over the Internet. I received hundreds of emails from young pregnant women all over the world — many of whom hadn’t told a soul their sacred secret — and I was able to avoid working on my own marital issues by doling out advice to others. I wasn’t just intoxicated by my stories, I was relying on my stories for income and self-worth.
And my fears — fear of failing at my marriage, fear of letting down the women who looked to me for hope, fear of doing irreversible damage to my sweet, sensitive child — further silenced the truth I didn’t want to hear. Too often I’d think, How can my marriage be falling apart when I started a Web site to prove young couples can have happy marriages? How can I inspire women when my life is such a mess?
Elizabeth’s prayer gave me clarity: If I wanted to remove the veils, I also had to dissolve the stories and fears. What I needed was truth, even if the truth was devastating. Even if it destroyed everything I built and hurt everyone I loved. Give me truth at any cost, I asked the quiet. Please. Please remove the veils.
Something in me kept repeating that phrase. I had a sinking feeling that there was something, or many somethings, I still wasn’t seeing around me. After all, the dynamic of my marriage was just a continuation of what I had practiced throughout my life — believing someone else’s more convenient version of reality, even when it didn’t match my own inner truth, until I no longer knew what I thought or felt or had even witnessed. My husband didn’t just lie to me; I actively believed him without question because I didn’t trust my own judgment. But I had had enough. What else wasn’t I seeing? What is true? What is real?
Please remove the veils.
Those words beat like a drum in the background as the fabric of my life swiftly unraveled — starting with my choice to come home from that retreat, pull my husband into our bedroom and cry out my most basic truth: I need space to heal. Physical space. When I was away for the weekend, I had a clear signal. But as soon as I walked back in the door — back into the familiar thick air — I felt fuzzy and agitated. It was as if our house was tuned to the wrong frequency, and a low-level static blocked me from hearing what I knew, blinded me from seeing what was right in front of me. When I wasn’t sharing a physical space with him — at the retreat, at work, or in the car, rage-crying into my steering wheel — the internal interference cleared.
The prayer followed me in the weeks that came after, as he moved out and spiraled into a self-destructive path beyond anything I could have foreseen. Without the protective veil of my delusion, the true nature of his addiction ravaged his body and threatened his life. Two head-on car accidents in the span of a month; a mysterious new stab wound on his abdomen, probably from something drug-related. He took out a credit card in my name and continuously siphoned money from my account (no matter how many times I changed PINs, passwords, and entire banks). He tracked my phone, stalking my movements. Finally a strange woman messaged me photos of my ex in her bed, along with money-related threats, and I hit my boundary. I filed a restraining order with the help of a local domestic violence agency. They assured me that just because my husband never left a bruise, never raised his voice or called me names, his behavior was abusive — especially since our separation — and I deserved protection.
I didn’t recognize him. He was colder, darker in the eyes.
Keep removing the veils.
It was the anchoring mantra that got me through the next few months when he told me he was having a baby with a different woman, a complete stranger to me — and it was this woman and this baby who made him want to be a better man. Suddenly my deepest wounds were revealed under layers and layers of vanishing veils: I was unlovable, unworthy, not chosen.
I started to crave the expanded perspective, even when it was blindingly painful at first. Because every single time, the hard revelations led to understanding and improvement. Every time, it felt like freedom.
Keep removing the veils.
And then exactly one year later, in September 2017, another veil was lifted, revealing a reality I truly didn’t want to see — but I had no choice.
Michelle Horton
***
Read more of my writing at my free Substack: wild purple flowers
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message 1:
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Martha
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Jun 25, 2025 05:09AM
I look forward to reading you book but am also afraid of the old wounds that may surface.
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