Being Broken Makes Me Whole

Get rid of the stuff that's weighing me down.

Sometimes, that 'stuff' is beliefs that have outlived their usefulness.

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I spent most of my childhood fighting a feeling of being broken. As a teenager, I was broken a majority of the time, and became convinced that I needed fixing. In my twenties, I was pretty sure I'd smoothed over all the broken spots and was healthy and ready for adulthood.

Throughout all of it, I thought of broken as a weakness to be hardened, avoided, fixed, overcome. It was never something I was willing to accept as a part of life.

Just recently, I've started looking at my brokenness in a new way. Being fragile and vulnerable to cracking makes me open to possibilities. When I am willing to hurt, that allows me to feel more freely, to be more honest, to examine and discard old beliefs that no longer serve me.

Imagine a hollow ceramic ball with a clean white glaze. There is a light inside, perfectly preserved. It won't be changed by any external force, because it's completely enclosed.
These are the beliefs we hold – the ones we develop over time, that have been proven out by our experiences. We don't need to reexamine these beliefs because they've been comfortably contained. They've become part of us.

It's not until the ball is cracked and light shines through that we have the opportunity to examine the beliefs we took on long before, and haven't thought about since. On top of that, we are vulnerable to the things outside that sphere - we have the chance to live new ideas and new ways of looking at the world.

Change is hard. By it's nature, it creates cracks in what we were in order to make room for what we're becoming.

Suddenly, being broken and fragile are no longer things I need to overcome. My ceramic fortress has become an eggshell – a way to be reborn, repeatedly, into a greater and fuller life.