My Dear Friend,
I see you trying to be a good mother, father, wife, husband, daughter, son, sister, brother and friend. I see you striving to better yourself and even on your best days, still feeling inadequate. I know you’re trying to hold it all together, but sometimes you can’t help but fall apart. I am right there with you. Life doesn’t really go as planned for most of us. It sucks sometimes, plain and simple. We each face our trials and while life is a beautiful adventure, it is also hard. Life throws us moments that knock us down. We have our hearts broken and watch as our dreams come crashing down. We lose jobs, get rejected, make mistakes, get betrayed, and lose loved ones. We hold it together for so long and then it happens-We break.
I never thought it would happen to me. I took pride in being “whole” and happy. I didn’t break in a day. I broke little by little, day after day. Little pieces chipped away so slowly that at times I didn’t even notice, until I was sitting in the middle of my broken life that surrounded me like shattered glass. I wandered blindly picking up pieces of myself, trying to fit everything back together so that you wouldn’t be able to tell that I broke in the first place. I held the pieces together until I couldn’t anymore. Why could I not pull it together? I beat myself up for breaking. Others beat me up for breaking. “Only weak things break”, I thought. I was supposed to be strong. I wasn’t supposed to be one of the broken ones, but here I was. My heart was broken, my body was broken, my spirit was broken.
Here I am, broken. There is beauty in being broken. The Japanese have a belief that things are more beautiful for being broken. They don’t cast out the broken pieces. They use gold to repair it and then it becomes more valuable to them. By breaking, I get to see all of the beautiful pieces that create my life and I have a choice. Do I give up? Do I see the remnants of my hopes, dreams and wishes and leave them there on the ground around me? Or do I find the strength to use not just the joy, but the sorrow as an opportunity to create a valuable masterpiece like the Japanese?
So my friend, I see you are broken. We broke in different ways, but we can be broken together. You don’t need to hold it all together all of the time. It’s ok if you need to rest. We can sit and rest together because I am tired too. This is hard. You aren’t alone and I’m glad that you are by my side. We’ll use the good times as gold to repair ourselves when the bad times break us. We can laugh together, cry together, and we can figure out this broken thing together. Together we will be beautifully broken.
Love,
Lauren (Your Beautifully Broken Friend)