By Contributor,Rachel Burchfield

Copyright forbes

Jen Hatmaker
Mackenzie Smith

Like many of us, Jen Hatmaker has a demarcation point in her life—the before and the after.

For Hatmaker, it was the moment her marriage ended. It was July 11, 2020. It was dramatic—almost too asinine to be believed. It involved drunken voice texts to the woman her husband was having an affair with, when Hatmaker was, he presumed, asleep next to him. Her life would never be the same—and after it hurt like hell, she tells me on Zoom almost exactly five years later that it was ultimately one of the best things that had ever happened to her.

“And it’s so stunning to say that, because I would never in a million years wanted to have experienced the end of my marriage in that way, and that remains true,” she says. “It was a catastrophe, and the way in which it ended was so painful and so traumatic for me and my kids and my family. So it’s not that—it’s not the way that it happened, but that ultimately being out of that marriage and discovering this next iteration of myself was going to be one of the most stunning, exhilarating journeys of my whole life. I did not know what I was capable of, to be honest. I did not know what I could do by myself.”

Hatmaker is 51 today, and was nearly 46 years old when it all fell apart. She was 19 years old when she married—so young that she wasn’t even able to drink alcohol at her reception. When it all fell apart—or, as Hatmaker puts it, “When I lost my marriage”—she had been married for 26 years. She had no idea how much money she made—her husband handled the finances. She had never been in the driver’s seat when it came to filing taxes. Particularly when it came to finances, in her new chapter she felt totally clueless. That has since changed. In fact, so much has changed. Hatmaker’s not sure she would have believed it, but if she could speak to the version of herself watching as her life imploded around her in the early morning hours of that July day, she’d tell her that one day, she’d be glad it happened.

Hatmaker’s latest memoir, ‘Awake,’ is out Sept. 23.
Courtesy of Jen Hatmaker

“I look in the mirror now and go, ‘There you are,’” she says of her new self. “‘You were in there. You were in there, but you were buried under a lot of those faulty bricks.’”

Hatmaker has made it her business to be vulnerable, yet nothing she’s written heretofore cuts right to the root like her latest project. Dr. Brené Brown is an expert in vulnerability, and her TEDx talk “The Power of Vulnerability” remains one of the platform’s most popular talks. Speaking to Forbes previously, she defined vulnerability as “basically uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure,” and admitted that she “spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability.”

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“My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty—love, belonging, trust, joy and creativity, to name a few,” she said. “Learning how to be vulnerable has been a street fight for me, but it’s been worth it.”

‘Awake’ is Hatmaker’s most vulnerable work to date.
Lisa Woods Photography

“I would have never in a billion years thought that this was going to be my story”

Hatmaker has written a book about when her marriage fell apart, and how she picked herself up, brick by brick, in the aftermath. It’s called Awake, and she’s quick to point out that “it’s not just a sad divorce book.” Instead, it’s a book about midlife reinvention. “This is possible for, really, all of us,” she says. “We have it in us. And that’s really good news, and I love that that’s eventually where the story gets to.”

The book, out September 23, is poignantly divided into sections, and the memoir begins with “The Ending” and leads up to her reinvention, or “The Beginning.” It is filled with takeaways, like that “Endings don’t have to be awful,” “Divorce breaks a million hearts” and “My marriage is broken, but I’m not. I guess no one can ever take me from me. Here I still am.” Elsewhere, she writes, “My forever looks different than I expected, but sometimes beautiful things do.” She details how she “wanted the story of our marriage, not our actual marriage,” and that the unraveling of her partnership was “quieter than I expected.”

“I remember just thinking, ‘Wow, my life’s falling apart in real time, and it’s just quiet and the world is still spinning, and I’m just sitting here and everything is disintegrating by the second,’” she tells me. “Isn’t it crazy? You don’t know. Well, you hope that’s never going to happen to you. I had no imagination for this story. I would have never in a billion years thought that this was going to be my story. But you might think it’s all going to go down in a blaze of glory, and just to be sitting there in this dark room, I just thought, ‘Oh, this is how a life unravels. And sometimes it’s quiet.’”

The book examines the unraveling of Hatmaker’s marriage in 2020.
Courtesy of Jen Hatmaker

“Going back into those moments was really, really hard”

“Most of us will reckon with a date, with a moment where there is some sort of before and after, and we have to stare down ‘Who am I going to be? Who do I want to be?’” Hatmaker says. “‘What story do I want to build out of this?’ And that, to me, is something almost everybody can relate to. And I always tell people, if you have never had a date or a before and after moment, just live longer. You will. You will. It’ll come.”

Sometimes the before and after moment comes from catastrophe; sometimes it comes by conscious choice. Regardless, almost all of us have that demarcation point. Awake teaches that it doesn’t have to be feared—rather, to be embraced for the gift that it is.

Now, with enough distance from the end of her marriage, Hatmaker says she can look back and see so many red flags she ignored. She can also, she tells me, see where she went wrong. The mistakes she made. Marriages hardly ever fall apart as a one-person job. It takes two.

“I was committed to the story of our marriage,” Hatmaker says. “I wanted it. I wanted it. That was the story I wanted. I wanted a 50-year anniversary. I wanted to walk our kids down the aisle. I wanted to rock our grandbabies together on the porch. I wanted my family to always have this soft landing space for their entire rest of their life. And I wanted that story so much that I was willing to still believe I was living it, even when I clearly was not. And so, boy, that moment of facing a truth that you don’t want is so brutal.” She adds that she was “clinging so hard to a story.”

Finding out about her now ex-husband’s affair “certainly put an end to the bullshit,” she says. “So, whatever story I was clinging to, it put an end to it. There are some moments in life that everything is reduced down to the rock bottom level of its truth. So everything else was over, which in some ways was a relief.”

Enter what she refers to as the gift of grief: “The gifts are endless,” Hatmaker says. “They’re endless. It’s so crazy to say it. And I know somebody right now, in the middle of their grief, in the middle of it, when everything is just a black cloud, is just thinking, ‘Ugh, shut up. What a stupid and mean and heartless and unhelpful thing to say.’ And I know, I remember when people told me the same thing, and I was like, ‘Well, how nice for you to be thinking that thought. I’m just going to be sitting here in the absolute rubble of my life.’ But if we will allow grief to be a teacher and a leader and a trustworthy guide, I think people would be shocked where it will lead us. And that is into healing and into reinvention, and it’s a beautiful partner in recovery.”

Hatmaker says it was difficult to revisit the most painful period in her life in the pages of the book.
Courtesy of Jen Hatmaker

There’s a saying that to teach, one must first experience. Hatmaker certainly has the lived experience and, while she’s not really teaching, per se, she’s certainly dispensing hard-earned wisdom. “Going back into those moments was really, really hard,” she admits. “Writing the first third of the book was so painful.” Hatmaker and her ex-husband share five children together, ergo, they will always be in one another’s lives. The pressure to tell the story in a way that was true but also fair had to be enormous.

“There’s a lot of people in this story,” Hatmaker says. “And I wanted to be generous, and I wanted to be fair, and I wanted to be self-aware, and I did not want to paint myself just as a victim of somebody else’s choices. And so that North Star was never out of my mind, ever.”

She continually asked herself as she was writing Awake, “Will I be proud of this in five years? And that was a real good filter for me when I was on the fence about either including something or how to include it. That was my question. Will I be proud of the way that I wrote that in five years? And that turned into a lot of delete buttons.”

When we spoke ahead of the book’s release, one of her sons had just read Awake the week prior. This, in Hatmaker’s words, “is not a kid who reads my books.” Upon reading it, he told her, “Wow, I forgot that you were a person in this story, too, that you were the major player actually.”

“And he said, “Mom, when I look back on it now, knowing what I know five years later, you really steadied the ship,’” Hatmaker tells me. “And I thought, ‘What a nice thing to say.’”

Hatmaker has long been in the business of vulnerability.
Courtesy of Jen Hatmaker

“This is a better version of me”

For the first time since she was a teenager, Hatmaker started dating again. She’s happily partnered now, and, as she puts it, “so sturdy and happy in my own life, and it’s such a wonder to be able to say that. I mean, it really is. And I feel a new level, for sure, of gratitude for every good thing.”

“This is a better version of me,” she continues. “I like me now better than the 19-year-old me that got married, right? We’re better, we’re smarter, we’re wiser.” She adds, “And, again, I know that I don’t mean to paint such a tidy picture of such a life-altering loss. Only just to say, life comes back. We do recover, we do. And we can rebuild on a sturdier foundation and we can examine the pieces that we want to leave behind in the rubble and go, ‘I am not going to bring that forward into the next iteration of who I am. And we all get to do that. And so I’m just grateful. That’s the number one word I can tell you today.”

When it comes to writing books, sometimes titles come immediately, Hatmaker tells me. This one, Awake, did not. She tells me she had never written like this before—it was a new format. She didn’t know where the book was going to go when she started. When she got to the end of the book, she thought about the story she wanted to tell, the story that ended up coming out of the pages.

“And then it just sort of rose up that there was this sense of, in so many ways, kind of sleepwalking through my entire story, certainly pieces of it, parts of it where I just went, ‘I don’t want to look at that with wide open eyes,’” Hatmaker says. “‘So instead I’m just going to put that in a drawer and shut it.’ And so, this idea of being fully awake, like, okay, whatever it is, however challenging, however disappointing, however hard—whatever it’s going to require of me, what I hope for in the second half of my life is that I choose not to ever shut my eyes.”

Despite the pain, Hatmaker says she is ultimately glad she walked through the fire and made it to the other side.
Courtesy of Jen Hatmaker

“I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve”

Ahead of Awake’s release, Hatmaker is, as she often does, thinking about her readers. That many of them need a reckoning in their lives, and that she hopes Awake can be a catalyst for that.

“I hope that she will close the book and say, ‘I know the next thing to do for me, to actually live awake in my own life, and I have a feeling that thing is going to be hard,’” Hatmaker says. “I have a feeling that is going to include a level of truth-telling that has thus far been unavailable or simply unchosen, however you want to look at it. And I wish so much that I would’ve chosen my path instead of having it chosen for me. And so I hope that my readers will go before catastrophe befalls them.”

“I hope that my reader will go, ‘I know what to do next,’ and then have the courage to do it and then live in truth,” she adds. “It’s the most wonderful, free way to live, no matter what.”

Hatmaker says she hopes her readers resonate with the vulnerability she poured onto the pages of ‘Awake.’
Courtesy of Jen Hatmaker

The reader, Hatmaker knows, will do “whatever she needs to do with it,” she says. “She will take what she needs and leave the rest. She will lay her own story on top of it and find out what she needed to hear. It’s up to her. And so that, for the first time, is a real mystery for me. I don’t know what’s going to happen with this book once it hits the hands of its readers. I have no idea. I didn’t lead the witness that much. And so I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve waiting to see it change a lot of lives.”

Let Hatmaker be the first to tell you—it wasn’t “all just tied up in a bow and there was never any sadness again,” she says. “That’s not how life works, and that’s not how divorce works, and that’s not how my story works. But keep going, no matter what you’ve lost or are currently losing—no matter how scary it feels, how disrupted your life is, how uncertain your future is. Just keep going, because you are so capable of a beautiful life.”

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