I separated from my husband not long after Eat Pray Love came out. By the time the divorce was finalised a year later, I had, against my will, acquired three copies of Elizabeth Gilbert’s divorce memoir. One arrived anonymously in the mail. Two others were slid across cafe tables by friends who looked at me with the sort of expression people usually reserve for the recently bereaved.

If you’re one of the few who missed the Eat Pray Love phenomenon, the premise was simple enough: God comes to Elizabeth Gilbert on the floor of her bathroom after hours of praying and gives her the confirmation she needs to leave her husband, so she destroys her marriage and reconstructs herself overseas. Italy for appetite. India for spirituality. Bali for love.

This kind of drama is the lifeblood of a divorce narrative: marriage-ending equals world-ending. There’s also a factoid that people quote with alarming solemnity: that divorce, moving house and death are life’s three greatest stressors.

My own divorce, however, felt less like catastrophe and more like admin. There were no lawyers. No custody arrangements. No dramatic division of money or real estate. I was 28 years old and our shared assets amounted to one large IKEA saucepan and a collection of Curb Your Enthusiasm DVDs.

I got the saucepan.

We had been together since we were 20. Married for four years. The marriage did not end because anybody committed some unforgivable act. It ended because somewhere along the way I began to feel fixed in place.

I remember worrying too much about the wedding gifts. Would his old boss want the juicer back?

At 27, I had started to feel as though I was trapped inside an earlier version of myself. The person I had been at 20 was still making decisions for me. There were things I wanted to do, ways I wanted to live and selves I wanted to try on. I could not work out whether growth inside a marriage was possible when the marriage itself had been built when we were so young.

Now that I’m in a healthy relationship that supports change, I know this growth is possible. But at 27, I lacked the language for any of this.

Nobody tells you how to get divorced, especially when so young. We were the first of our friends to marry and both our sets of parents were still together. We had no earthly idea what was supposed to happen next. (I’ve often thought there should be a small bureaucratic clause in your marriage certificate: In the event of dissolution, do not panic. This happens all the time!)

My reference points for divorce were Elizabeth Gilbert and Elizabeth Taylor: one made divorce appear spiritually transformative, the other made it look glamorous. Mine was neither. Nothing was dramatically wrong. My husband was kind. There was no betrayal, no event I could pinpoint to justify dismantling a life. If anything, this just made the divorce feel faintly embarrassing.

We had stood in front of our friends and families and announced, with absolute confidence, that this arrangement would last forever. Then, four years later, our pledge was quietly redacted.

I remember worrying too much about the wedding gifts. Would his old boss want the juicer back? At the time, this seemed as pressing a concern as the emotional collapse of the marriage itself.

By the time we officially separated, we were already living in different cities and leading separate lives with increasing competence. The divorce itself happened almost entirely via paperwork in Australia while we were living in the UK. Nobody appeared in court. At one point, my ex-husband phoned someone to confirm the paperwork had gone through, then he texted me. And that was that. A marriage over in a text message.

Afterwards, I found myself trying out different performances of a young divorcee. My instinct was to make a joke of it by referring to it as my “first divorce”, like it was no big deal. But it was a big deal. It was desperately sad, and it made me feel ashamed. I had made a public declaration and then failed to uphold it.

But as time passed – and my therapy sessions increased – I was able to start to reframe it. What if the divorce was not the tragedy? What if the tragedy had been remaining exactly where I was?

Because with the shame came a powerful sense of uncertainty (and hope) about the shape the future held. Suddenly, I felt free from the exhausting pressure of trying to force permanence onto something that no longer fit. I felt relief from the idea that staying was inherently more virtuous than leaving.

We tend to see marriage as success and divorce as failure because culturally we remain deeply invested in endurance as a moral achievement. But sometimes ending a marriage is the hopeful act.

I didn’t speak to God, I didn’t go to an ashram or have my life changed by a plate of spaghetti.

What I experienced instead was quieter. It was the sense that my life had become, once again, unwritten. And with my pen in hand, I was ready to start again.

I Love the Whole World! (Penguin Random House) by Victoria Hannan is out August 11.