What if the magic was always within me, not in the relationship?

As I am now coming up on a year of doing life alone, I wonder how much of our "we did life so well together" was me vs him vs true coordination from both of us.  How much of my fear of handling it all alone is missing his physical presence vs missing his contributions?  And if it's just missing his physical presence, what am I really afraid of?

I remember when we stood up from the kitchen table about a year ago after having finalized a property division spreadsheet, he turned to me and said "I'm going to miss your resourcefulness."  I don't think I really understood what he meant so I just tucked it away to contemplate later.

When I think back to the context of his comment about my resourcefulness, it was after I had done the work to figure out how to value our pensions so that we could find other ways to fairly offset his pension which he didn't want me getting any part of.   I'm happy with the end result but I realize now it was truly on me to figure out how to get to that end result.

When we moved south, I took the lead in finding apartment complexes to tour and then was the one to communicate with the leasing office to secure a unit.  And it was on me to find renters and auto insurance and figure out the process to transfer our cars/licenses.  (It's interesting to realize that despite cars being his obsession, I always dealt with our insurance agent.  They knew me by name, not him.) 

I'm pretty sure I was the one who took the lead on finding a realtor to sell our Wisconsin house and communicating with the realtor we chose.  I was also the one who dealt with the realtor when we sold our underwater condo in Minnesota and brainstormed how to come up with the cash for the closing.

And then I think back to the day I moved into my own apartment.  We both worked from home that morning.  In order for each of us to pick up our respective keys to our new apartments, we needed documentation from the power company that we had put the electricity in our names.  He hadn't received that documentation yet and was panicking.  When he called it turned he had put the wrong date down for the start date.  It was kind of a surreal moment as I sat there calmly watching him fall apart over this little detail.  I remember thinking to myself, "he depended on me more than he even realizes."  As I reflect on it further, it is quite eye opening because my image of him was always of someone who had his shit together, at least on a practical level.

Maybe there wasn't magic in how well we worked together.  Maybe it was me.  He may have been my security blanket.  I'm sure at times he was also helpful in bouncing ideas off.  But in hindsight, I'm now starting to realize, I may have been a pretty significant contributing factor in how easily we navigated life together.

Maybe I was so focused on what "we" accomplished in life that I lost sight of my specific role in all of it.

So going back to the post I wrote two days ago called Emotional Intimacy, this view in today's post really highlights how my perceptions are created and can change significantly with more information, time, reflection, etc.  It's kind of mind-blowing to realize how dependent our experience is on the perceptions we create in the moment.

I'm in the middle of Daniel Kahneman's book titled, Thinking, Fast and Slow that is making me realize how little I understand about how my mind works and thus how little I truly know about myself (as my perception of self is created from that same mind I don't exactly understand).