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"It seems I need to say a big thank you to Peter. Without any conscious effort on his part, he&amp;#039;s become the catalyst for me pursuing something I&amp;#039;ve always loved to do. In the years we were together, I pushed my writing to a back-burner. I never stopped writing \u2013 I&amp;#039;ve done it my whole life \u2013 but I never thought I&amp;#039;d be good enough to do more with it. I never had the guts to try. Then he walked out and I realized I had nobody in my way but me. I also realized I probably never had anybody in my way but me all along, and I&amp;#039;ve wasted a lot of time. So I took some of the pieces I&amp;#039;ve written and started submitting them to various contests I&amp;#039;ve found. None of them are big cash prizes, but they&amp;#039;re experience, and I need that. It turns out that a piece of poetry I submitted was the prize winner for September at Writer&amp;#039;s Type , an online literary competition site. They were kind enough to publish me after critiquing me, so there I am, if you want to read it. I was really surprised by this one since I rarely write poetry, and I&amp;#039;m not generally very good at it. This time, it just sort of flowed. The funny thing about divorce is it forces you to realize how much you&amp;#039;ve blamed on the other person in your life equation. Once you remove that denominator, it&amp;#039;s up to you to decide what&amp;#039;s on the other side of that equals sign. And you&amp;#039;ve got to admit that you could have added in whatever you needed to all along, and maybe made the whole thing bigger, or better, or more evenly balanced. I can go on and on about how I didn&amp;#039;t want to take time from my family or didn&amp;#039;t want to seem selfish, but if I&amp;#039;d done some more things for me, maybe I would have been a more exciting package for him. I have no idea if that would have made a difference to Peter, but it sure would have made a difference to me. Do you find yourself realizing all that you could have done for yourself, in retrospect? And do you think if you had, it would have helped your marriage? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/relationships/dating-marriage/a40776/you-just-never-know-15904/>