Falling in love with my first husband was easy.
We were students at Stanford Law School, young and ambitious. We studied together in the library late at night. Sometimes, walking across campus, he’d walk down an invisible staircase, lowering himself step by step, completely straight-faced. He was funny, brilliant, and kind. Being loved by him made me feel chosen for the first time. I mistook that feeling for home.
We imagined our future in broad strokes. Successful careers. A beautiful home. Children eventually. A meaningful life. Love, too, felt like something to pragmatically build. You worked hard, followed the plan, made smart choices. The future rewarded you accordingly.
Years later, I was sitting at my Cleveland law firm desk when the phone rang, a stack of case files in front of me. Caller ID said it was my fertility doctor. I pushed paperwork aside and answered, a pit in my stomach. “Sindy,” the doctor said. “Are you sitting down?” What else would I be doing at a desk job, I joked. But the doctor wasn’t laughing. “Premature ovarian failure,” she said gravely. My doctor’s words landed with a finality I wasn’t prepared for. “You will never have children of your own.”
I stood up, momentarily stunned. I ran five miles most days. My work product exceeded expectations. I was doing everything right. Quietly, without my permission, my body had missed a filing deadline. “Sindy? Did you hear me?”
“Yes,” I said shakily, feeling unmoored though I gripped the edge of my desk. “Understood.” I hung up, and kept my hand on the receiver as if to steady myself. There were billable hours to log. The machine of my life didn’t pause for existential news. I wouldn’t either. Between drafting motions and preparing for depositions, I googled terms like follicle-stimulating hormone and ovarian reserve.
At first, I believed the diagnosis itself was the crisis. Over time, I understood something deeper had been interrupted. Until then, my life unfolded with forward momentum. School, career, marriage, each step flowed naturally into the next. The diagnosis brought that conveyor belt to a halt.
My husband was bereft. Kids were part of The Plan. Luckily, my husband’s family was well connected at a nearby hospital. Before I could say “adoption,” we had an appointment scheduled with a top fertility specialist, courtesy of my father-in-law.
The specialty clinic’s waiting room looked like a corporate lobby: neutral carpet, framed prints of flowers, a coffee machine humming in the corner. I usually felt at ease in corporate lobbies. Not this one. Mothers-to-be flipped through binders thick with donor profiles. Pages of profiles moved under my fingers, but no single one called to me. The room was full. My husband sat beside me in it. Still, I felt alone. Having a baby this way felt less like medicine and more like procurement.
At consultation, our doctor pronounced me able to carry a donor egg to term. The baby wouldn’t be genetically mine, but I would no doubt be its mother. He spoke in probabilities and percentages. Success rates. Retrieval timelines. Hormone protocols. He had zero bedside manner and even less personal warmth, but lots of certainty. An egg donor was the only way to proceed. And if we chose one, he could make a baby happen, fast.
My husband and in-laws began discussing donor profiles as if we were hiring a law clerk. They wanted the best eggs money could buy: a tall blond from Harvard. Bonus if she was Catholic. As a 5’1” brunette Jew, I floated the idea that the donor be Jewish. The biological mother being Jewish, my husband informed me, “wasn’t a thing.” The conversation moved on. He turned back toward his father, absorbed again into the logic of a donor’s GPA, as if I’d never asked any question. A painful clarity overtook me. My husband’s journey toward parenthood was this display of allegiance for his father. My new position as mother-to-be was simply to cooperate.
I had spent years becoming skilled at this kind of disappearance. I had been good for a long time – good daughter, good student, good associate, good wife. I knew how to please people with my competence. I knew how to absorb discomfort and keep going. What I did not know was how to stop.
The morning of our follow-up appointment with the fertility specialist, I told my husband I didn’t want to go. I tried to explain the process felt deeply wrong to me, though I could barely articulate why. What I hadn’t said but knew: I felt absent from my own life, erased through a series of reasonable decisions which left no room for my own inner knowing. Instead of hearing my hesitation, he interrupted me. How rude it would be to cancel on such a busy doctor. So we went.
Everything in me was saying no, just not out loud. My inner no did not express itself calmly, mind you. Nor did it say no kindly. I was kind of, ironically, like an egg under pressure. Outside, everything appeared intact. Inside, tension had built to the point of expansion, straining against the shell.
One night, in the middle of all our donor conversations, my husband and I went out to dinner. I ordered glass after glass of California chardonnay. I don’t remember much of the evening. I do remember the fight. It was ugly. I had swallowed too much for too long and could no longer curate myself. The words that flew from my mouth: “I’ll leave you so fast your head will spin.” Two weeks later, I moved out.
I left behind the furniture. The wedding gifts. The artwork. Even the welcome mat from the San Francisco firm where I had started my career. What I took were paperback books and photo albums. That was almost all.
The first night in the apartment was unnervingly quiet. No dishwasher. No television. Just the sound of my own breathing. I kept expecting to hear him move through the next room. The familiar sounds of footsteps in the hallway, the low murmur of his voice on the phone. The absence of those sounds felt almost physical, as though some organizing structure of my life had disappeared.
I had spent years absorbing other people’s expectations so skillfully, I could barely hear my own voice anymore. Now there was nothing left to drown it out. No one asking me to be anything. No one to perform for. I sat cross-legged on the floor between two stacks of books and realized I had not been alone with myself in years. I remember looking around that small apartment and thinking this is how the rest of my life is going to feel. Right there on my floor, I vowed to never love again.
It was disorienting. I grieved not only the loss of my marriage, but the loss of the self I had once been inside our future – hopeful, alive, connected to something larger than myself. But inside that emptiness, a question slowly began to emerge: What is actually true for me?
I did not yet know that this question would eventually lead me to yoga. Or that years later, sitting in a yoga philosophy training, I would encounter a text that felt less like reading and more like the exhilarating intimacy of being truly seen.
The text was the Bhagavad Gita, a foundational text of yoga philosophy. It unfolds on the eve of a catastrophic but necessary war. A warrior named Arjuna, prepared his entire life for battle, suddenly finds himself unable to fight when he realizes the people before him are his own relatives, teachers, and friends. Overcome with confusion, he lowers his bow. Beside him in the chariot sits Krishna, his guide and companion, and also an incarnation of the divine. What follows is a conversation about how to act when every available choice feels painful. Arjuna’s crisis was not simply fear, but the collapse of the identity he had built his life around. Reading the Gita, I recognized something: the experience of realizing that the life you carefully constructed no longer aligns with something essential inside you.
I fell in love with the Bhagavad Gita slowly at first, then all at once. I carried translations in my bag the way people carry letters from someone they ache to hear from again. I underlined passages obsessively. Scribbled notes in the margins. Certain verses followed me throughout the day. I’d read a line in the morning and feel it return hours later while driving or folding laundry or standing in line at the grocery store. The text began rearranging something inside me.
Krishna’s conversation with Arjuna felt personal. Alive. Not philosophical in the distant intellectual sense. I recognized myself in Arjuna’s exhaustion, his confusion, his longing to escape the unbearable weight of difficult choices. But I also felt something else happening as I read: a gradual loosening of the identity I had spent years performing. The endlessly accommodating woman. The good girl. The person who mistook self-erasure for love.
The Gita did not ask me to become fearless. It asked something both simpler and more difficult: that I stop abandoning myself. Again and again, Krishna calls Arjuna to meet reality as it is and act anyway – without collapsing, turning away, or waiting for certainty first. Reading the Gita, I began to understand that much of what had allowed me to survive the unraveling of my marriage had been an instinctive search for exactly these capacities.
And somewhere along the way, something in me came back to life. The world felt more vivid. I felt more vivid. The same way falling in love can suddenly sharpen color and sound and sensation, the Gita returned me to parts of myself I had not realized were gone. For years, I had believed love required becoming who others needed me to be. The Gita offered me another possibility: that real love – whether divine, human, or directed toward oneself – does not require self-abandonment. And for the first time in a very long time, I began to feel myself returning home.
