Originally drafted September 8, 2025. Revised December 2025-January 2026. 

For the last eight years I had the luxury of doing laundry whenever I wanted. I lived in a house that my ex-husband and I owned with a washer and dryer in the basement. It was just us and we didn’t have to share the washing machines with anyone else. Laundry was almost like electricity or water, something that I could take for granted and turn on and off whenever I wanted to. The ease of doing laundry meant that I didn’t have to think about how to pay for it or how to transport it or what to wash first. I could just do it. And that meant that in recent years, laundry became one of the chores I really didn’t mind because it seemed so easy. Because it was easy. So easy.

Laundry was not easy during most of my young adulthood. For years before I lived in the house I lugged laundry down to scary basements where I wasn’t sure if someone else’s underpants would be hiding in the washing machine, constantly getting rolls of quarters from the bank, and doing an awkward dance of timing my laundry with my neighbors’ schedules. If I wasn’t doing laundry in a scary basement then I was doing it in a laundromat where at best older women shared kind words with me and at worst men called me horrible names because I wouldn’t give them any of my quarters.

But now I am back at a laundromat for the first time in years because I don’t live in the house with the easy laundry system anymore. This past April my husband of nine years told me he didn’t want to be married to me anymore, and today I saw him for what might be the last time as he leaves Cincinnati. We took care of separating the car titles this morning, and then I came back to my new apartment which has been mounting up with piles of laundry as I unpack all of the dishes my friends packed in between layers of my sweaters and dozens of tea towels. 

In January 2024 when my appendix burst and I was hospitalized for ten nights, and then my dad was admitted to the same hospital for a fall and died shortly after surgery, it was so surreal and so unlike anything I could convey to anyone else that all I kept telling myself was that I didn’t have to make meaning from my trauma. I did not have to mine my pain for content, I did not have to tie it up with a bow, I did not have to talk about it, I did not have to find a silver lining. Living in the shadow of post-Katrina New Orleans taught me that sometimes horrifying, traumatic, and painful things happen to you and it’s your right to box it up and forget about it as a way of healing. No one is owed your trauma (not even archivists).

When your appendix bursts and your dad dies, there is no one at fault. The “why” is easy to answer: because sometimes bodies do weird shit, and because at some point an elderly body gives out and no amount of modern medicine can bring them back. No one plans to get appendicitis, and my dad had been having health issues for many years. Months before he died, he told me that he was ready to go. But when my husband told me he wanted to leave me, it felt like the ground opened up beneath my feet and my first question was “why?” 

I was totally blindsided. I always assumed we would seek marriage counseling if things went off the rails and when I asked my husband why he didn’t want to go to counseling he said it would be delaying the inevitable. He said his mind was made up even though just a few months ago he told me we were a team effort when I worried about my self-employment prospects with the new presidential administration. 

In the immediate aftermath of my husband leaving me, I went in the opposite direction of the pain of my appendicitis and dad’s death: I talked about it to everyone, even people perhaps I should have shared less with. I was in such visceral pain for so long that even though I wanted to believe I could do the same thing as a year before, that I didn’t have to make meaning from my trauma, it became pretty clear pretty quickly that unless I did exactly what I had sworn I wouldn’t do a year before, I might get bogged down in revenge and bitterness. My husband’s reason for leaving me never really satisfied me because it was vague descriptions of how he had more fun without me and I’m not sure I’ll ever get the clear answer I felt like I deserved. At some point I asked him if he thought he was having a midlife crisis and he shrugged and said maybe he was. 

The pain I felt from my body being ravaged by the massive infection triggered by my appendix bursting and my dad dying was also blunted by the incredible painkillers I was on while I was in the hospital and in the immediate days afterwards. But there were no painkillers I could take when my marriage turned upside down and the ground opened up beneath my feet, not at least if I didn’t want to invite in the ghosts of family members who died from addiction. At the same time, being the victim of someone else’s midlife crisis without any painkillers to blunt the impacts made me ask what I want the rest of my life to look like, if I am being forced to rebuild and rethink everything I thought about my future. 

One of the hardest feelings to cope with about going through a divorce as the blindsided partner with the much lower income is the feeling that I’m going backwards. So much of this is tangled up with my own family history and sense of class. The first time in my life I felt real economic and material security is when I moved in with my husband, and now that I am no longer living with him I feel the wolf creeping back to the door. In the initial first few days after D-day, I convinced myself there was a way to stay in the house we had lived in for most of our marriage. Until I did some back of the envelope math and realized to stay I would probably have to cash out all of my retirement accounts. I put off making the decision until I talked to a guy who specializes in helping divorced people requalify for buying their own house, and that’s when it really became clear that the math wouldn’t math to stay. 

For the first couple of weeks I looked at apartments, I was obsessed with finding an in-unit washer/dryer. It initially was my sole requirement. And then I met up with a friend for drinks who was like, “girl the money you could save on settling for a unit without in-unit laundry would give you enough savings to take a trip to Europe.” I don’t know if I have the budget to go to Europe but I eventually settled on a unit that not only doesn’t have in-unit laundry but the washer/dryer in the basement freaks me out and so I go to the laundromat. But the unit is also way cheaper than the current median rent in Cincinnati and so I have been sucking it up. 

My laundromat is located down the street from Cincinnati’s first Carnegie Library. For the last couple of years I’ve enjoyed working at that branch when I need a change of scenery. It has rooms you can reserve and the internet is reliable. When you log on to the Cincinnati Public Library’s internet access page, you are presented with an old school end user agreement basically warning you that there is no lifeguard on duty on the world wide web, “because the Internet is a vast, unregulated medium.”

The phrase a vast, unregulated medium has always amused me ever since I encountered it. I have been chronically online in some capacity since I was a teenager typing a/s/l across AOL instant messenger and chatrooms with names like PoolParty123. Every problem I’ve encountered in my life since the late 1990s has a wildly unhinged corresponding parallel search history to accompany it, and going through this divorce has been no different as I’ve tried to find camaraderie, answers, and guidance from Al Gore’s internet as I’ve had to radically change my vision of my future moving into middle age. Besides the comfort and wisdom from friends and my local community, there have been numerous internet resources that have helped me figure out what the hell I’m doing now. 

A vast, unregulated medium is also a terrifyingly accurate description for visualizing rebuilding one’s life after an unexpected divorce. Despite what marriage defenders would have you believe, marriage is not vast, it is confining, and it is probably the most regulated social contract in existence. Vikki Stark’s website and book Runaway Husbands, the blog He Left Now What, the r/Divorce_Women subreddit, and other accounts of women publicly chronicling the rebuilding of their lives from the trauma of an unexpected divorce have been some of the most vital life preservers I’ve had in recent months. 

I’ve had some brief moments of hesitation about putting all of my pain and messiness out into the world this way. It feels anathema to my overdeveloped sense of Midwestern stoicism, my fear of losing my reputation for avowed professionalism, my tendencies towards vigorously protecting my privacy, or even my personal philosophy of living well as the best form of revenge.

But in one of my darkest moments of my divorce, I found myself sobbing in a ball on the kitchen floor of my old house and some inner voice told me to get the hell up because no man was ever worth sobbing on a floor for. And what I keep telling myself is that if writing about rebuilding my life can save even one other woman five minutes from the indignity of collapsing to the ground because of a man upending her life, it’s worth unloading as much as I can into this vast, unregulated medium.