How to Survive a Divorce While the World Is Burning

There’s a special kind of vertigo that comes from watching your own life fall apart while the world is also on fire. One minute you’re rereading an email from your lawyer, the next you’re scrolling past another breaking-news alert about something terrible and historic. The kids are asking for snacks. The kettle is boiling. Somewhere, a commentator is calmly explaining why everything might be collapsing. Your nervous system can’t tell which disaster to prioritize. It just knows: danger everywhere.

You start living in layers. On the surface: lunches, laundry, log-ins, pretending you remember what day it is. Under that: tracking every message from your soon-to-be ex, every shift in tone, every “just checking in” that makes your stomach drop. Deeper still: the quiet questions: who am I if I’m not their spouse? Who am I if I’m both devastated and secretly relieved? And beneath all of it, the wider world, cracking and groaning, tugging at you to do more, care more, show up more. There seems to be death every where you look. 

There’s guilt on every channel. Guilt that you’re not marching, calling, donating enough. Guilt that you’re even thinking about custody schedules while other people are facing unthinkable losses. Guilt that you snapped at your kids because there were just too many noises, too many needs, too many fires at once. Then shame about the guilt, because you know shame has never saved anyone. You feel like the smallest, least heroic version of yourself at the exact time you’re trying to become braver.

But this is the part nobody really talks about: becoming the kind of person who can speak up for others almost always starts with becoming the person who finally speaks up for herself. It doesn’t look grand. It looks like turning off the news when your chest tightens, even though the world is still burning. It looks like saying to your ex, “I’m not available to talk like this,” and putting your phone face-down. It looks like telling your lawyer, “I don’t understand—please explain it again,” and letting yourself take up that space.

It looks like sitting on the floor to build a Lego spaceship instead of doomscrolling, not because you don’t care about the world, but because this small piece of it—your child’s laugh, your steady breathing—deserves your full presence. It looks like baking a cake on a random Tuesday because the smell of vanilla and sugar reminds your body that joy is allowed even now. Joy doesn’t mean you’re ignoring the suffering. Joy is how your nervous system remembers that you are more than your pain.

It looks like donating ten dollars to a cause that matters to you, even when your own finances feel wobbly, and letting that be enough for today. It looks like calling a local official from the car, reading a little script you wrote in your Notes app between grocery lists and court dates. It looks like telling your kids, in language they can hold, “Some things are hard and scary right now. My job is to keep you as safe as I can. Your job is to be a kid.” Not perfect words—just your honest ones.

Every one of these moments is resistance. Every boundary you set with your ex, every time you say “I need a break,” every time you choose connection over self-erasure, you’re practicing the same muscle you’ll use to stand up for bigger things. You can’t carry every cause on your back while you’re also carrying boxes out of the house you used to call home. You’re allowed to be a person in transition in a world in transition. Of course it feels like too much. It is too much.

So you shrink the battlefield down to the smallest possible unit: one decision. A decision to reply calmly or not at all. A decision to let the dishes wait and sit under a blanket with your favorite show. A decision to text the friend who says, “Want me to just come sit with you?” A decision to open a window, take three deeper breaths, and thank your body for getting you this far. These are not tiny. These are how you keep the pilot light of yourself from going out.

Every time you decide like this, you are carving out a tiny circle of safety in the middle of the chaos. And from that circle, your voice grows louder. First for you. Eventually, again, for others. The world may be burning. Your old life may be crumbling in your hands. But you, right now, sitting on the floor with Legos or stirring cake batter or quietly drawing a boundary in a text message, are doing something profoundly radical: you are insisting that your nervous system, your story, and your small, bright acts of care matter. That’s how you survive a divorce while the world is burning. Not by out-running every fire. Not by fixing everything for everyone. But by lighting one little lamp inside your own house, and choosing, over and over, to protect that flame.