Letter from the Editor: This October Let’s Let the Masks Slip
There's something almost too on-the-nose about writing this in October — a month built entirely around masks, when so many of you are quietly working out how to take yours off.
You know the one I mean. The Person Going Through Divorce Mask. The one that performs the right amount of devastation at the school pickup line, downplays the relief of a quiet house, over-explains where dad is this weekend, and hides the fact that honestly, dinner alone with the kids and a rerun has been kind of great. Society still hasn't fully made peace with divorce, and so it hands us a script for how to grieve it publicly — convincingly, appropriately, on cue.
Here's the distinction worth sitting with: there's a real difference between sharing selectively and hiding out of shame. One comes from boundaries — protecting what's tender because it's yours, not because you're ashamed of it. The other comes from a need to convince someone else your pain is real enough, or your relief is quiet enough, to be acceptable. They can look identical from the outside. They feel nothing alike from the inside.
I think about a moment described in Olivia's and my upcoming book, Divorce Happens — a woman picking up sandwiches at her local deli, running into an acquaintance who does the sad-eyes-and-shoulder-touch routine and asks how she's really doing. She starts to perform the expected answer — devastated kids, blindsided, the whole script — before catching herself. Her kids were fine. She was fine. Better than fine, some days. She lands on something true instead: not easy, but they've got each other, and there's a sandwich waiting. Nobody standing over a chip aisle needed the whole story. She just needed to stop handing out the version that wasn't hers.
That's the mask coming off. Not a dramatic unveiling — just declining, in a small moment, to perform someone else's idea of your grief.
If this month's issue does anything, I hope it gives you a little more room to be exactly the imperfect, unfinished, occasionally-relieved version of yourself that's actually true — instead of the one everyone else is prepared to feel sorry for.
Here's to October, and to letting a few masks slip.
Best,
Jenny
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