I didn’t set out to be resilient when my marriage ended. I was focused on the next hour, not the resilience it would take to survive it.
Resilient AF The Sad Clown By Grant Garry
I have always enjoyed performing—singing, filmmaking, comedy, and generally entertaining others. I love making people laugh. It’s a useful skill—a survival skill, even. Laughter can soften a room, lift a spirit, and sometimes keep you afloat when nothing else can. Would you believe me if I told you I was voted Class Clown in high school? I knew how much joy it brought me and those around me.
What I didn’t know then was that one day I would become the sad clown.
The one whose job is to keep the show going while quietly unraveling backstage. And when I say unraveling backstage, I mean that literally—I once broke down during a performance, moments before stepping back into the light.
Divorce was never in my vocabulary. I loved that about myself. Not only did I never imagine it for my life, but I didn’t believe it could be for me. Marriage felt like a baseline rule. A promise. Something solid. Something sacred.
So when divorce entered my life, compounded by betrayal, it rearranged my brain chemistry. Suddenly, the past felt unreliable. Moments I once cherished began asking painful questions. Was any of it real? Did I imagine the safety? Did I miss the signs, or did I trust someone who knew exactly how to hide them? And the question that still haunts me: did they even know the real me?
When my marriage ended, I didn’t just lose a partner. I lost the story I had been telling myself about who I was, who I was becoming, and my identity as a spouse. I grieved a future I thought I would have with them. I grieved the intimacy. I grieved the version of myself who believed in something so deeply.
Betrayal adds a special layer of pain to grief—an already multilayered experience. There was no finality, no ritual, no collective remembering. Everything just stopped. It felt like the finale of The Sopranos. Cut to black. What did the vows mean? I thought part of the promise of marriage was that you wouldn’t break up. Betrayal doesn’t just hurt—it dismembers. You’re left bargaining, wondering why you weren’t enough or what you could have done differently to prevent it.
If it isn’t clear by now, I was not the one who wanted the divorce. I truly believed we could have worked on the marriage and made it better than before.
In those early days, I moved through life like an actor hitting their marks—saying the right lines, smiling at the right moments, never quite getting to the emotional core of the scene. At work, I was high-functioning. At home, I was face down on the floor, crying, convinced the pain would never end.
I sometimes joke that I’m the odd bastard child of the grief community. There’s no guidebook for divorce grief. Where did I fit? I was expected to “get over it.” People assumed that because I was young, I’d just find someone else. Would you say that to me if they had died?
Because this is a death, in some ways, it can feel even more painful—because the person is still alive, out in the world somewhere, just not in your world. It’s the death of a relationship, the death of a future, and perhaps most profoundly, the death of a version of yourself.
I wasn’t funny anymore. I didn’t laugh, sing, or act.
I felt so much shame and embarrassment that I didn’t tell many people for a long time. I thought that if everyone believed my life was good and normal, it might somehow return to being good and normal. It didn’t.
My therapist once asked me, “How do you feel knowing you did everything you possibly could—believed with all your heart that reconciliation was possible—and it still didn’t happen?” I didn’t have an answer then. I don’t really have one now.
What helped me move forward—and I say forward, not over it—was learning that grief doesn’t require resolution to be carried. Moving forward doesn’t mean leaving grief behind; it means learning how to live alongside it.
I joined a support group for divorced and separated people. For a long time, I believed no one could possibly understand what I was going through. Sitting in that room changed something. Finally, other people’s grieving relationships! And while we couldn’t understand exactly what the other was going through, we knew it was hard and painful. I started sharing my story a little at a time each week. It became a profoundly healing space. Grief needs to be witnessed.
Sidebar: I am a huge advocate for therapy, group therapy, and trusted friends.
I also started performing again. I got back on stage. I auditioned for a production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. No, I did not play Sweeney—though I am aware my baritone would have suited the role nicely.
Being in a show reminded me how much I love the creative community. Every production makes me feel like a kid again, like I never left school and still get to play. I became lighter in public. I laughed again. Then I landed my dream role as the Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. And believe me when I say I would have never been able to play that role as well as I did had I not gone through such a traumatic loss. It’s an odd feeling to be grateful to be able to pull from real-life experiences for a character you are playing. I certainly didn’t wish for the loss, but in those moments as that character, I was grateful for it. I think it allowed me to make the Beast more human.
But grief is not fooled by productivity. It waits. Patiently. And when it decides it’s had enough, it can come rushing in with the force of a thousand suns—sometimes while you’re touching up your guyliner backstage before singing “Ladies in Their Sensitivities.”
When I couldn’t outrun it anymore, I learned how to sit with the pain. To recognize it when it arrived and say, Alright. You’re here. Let’s stay for a moment. It was hard. Complex. I was missing someone who had hurt me deeply while having no idea what my future would look like, all while simultaneously living out my dreams on stage.
Could all of that be true at once?
Yes.
As a filmmaker and storyteller, I believe deeply in the power of story. That belief, paired with my own grief, became the seed for Meet Me Where I Am—the award-winning documentary about grief. I didn’t make it because I had answers. I made it because I had questions, and I wondered if others might want to share their stories with me. They did.
People were eager to talk—not to fix grief, but to tell the truth about living with it. Sitting quietly behind the camera, I often found myself thinking, That’s how I feel. I didn’t realize how much I needed my own grief witnessed until I was witnessing others’.
The film grew into something I am deeply proud of. It opened doors to deeper dialogue and eventually led to the podcast Where I Am—a space for long-form conversations about life, grief, and meaning. On the show, I often ask guests how they are doing today, how they feel at this moment. It’s the question I wish someone had asked me in the earliest days of my grief.
I recently released my first solo episode titled “The Sad Clown.” The image came from a painting at my parents’ house—a court jester holding a smiling mask while frowning underneath. I’d looked at it for years. But this past Christmas, it finally landed: That’s grief. The sad clown was me. Being deeply broken and deeply functional at the same time, and bringing light to others while privately learning how to survive the dark.
For a long time, I thought that made me dishonest. Now I understand it differently. It made me human.
I haven’t gained closure. I haven’t “accepted” it in the way people mean it. I’ve accepted that it happened. That doesn’t mean it was acceptable. What I gained instead was more of myself. I had to lose the person I cared about most to find Grant again.
I am not who I was before.
I am upgraded.
The sad clown doesn’t disappear. He just takes off the makeup when the show is over. He earns that he doesn’t have to perform happiness to earn love, and that his worth was never dependent on how well he hid his pain.
I found my voice. I found my people. I learned that I could live my dreams—stand on stage, tell stories, sing—and still carry grief. Both can exist. I don’t have to be over it. I just have to be honest.
That’s the story I’m telling for now—one conversation, one film, one character, one song, one shared moment at a time.
Meet me where I am. I promise I’ll do the same.
To practice resilience, I prayed. And didn’t stop.
Don’t ever feel pressure to rush yourself in or out of grief. Feel everything that comes up for you, find an outlet for your grief, and follow your passions. Finding and following something you are deeply passionate about can help you discover more of who you are during a time when you thought you had lost so much of yourself.
Are you ready to share your story of RESILIENCE? You can do that HERE.