Unbroken

Somebody told me today, "The whole idea of 'breaking' is vastly oversold in sports."

I replied that the whole I idea of 'breaking' is vastly oversold, period.

Too many people use that word to describe how they feel after ordinary life setbacks, defeats and embarrassments. Nine times out of ten they are not actually broken. They are maybe a little scuffed, a little shaken, a little dismayed, a little bruised. They don't know the difference between discomfort and pain, disappointment and devastation, getting dented and getting shattered, because they were over protected, coddled and pampered too much growing up. They were handed one too many participation trophies, told they were special one too many times, assured that they had an inalienable right not to be offended. If you've never been hurt, physically or emotionally, a paper cut probably feels like a compound fracture of the tibia.

Pain and upset, like everything else, exist on a sliding scale. The more we experience, the more context we have, and the more understanding we gain of how to deal with them. There is the hunger you feel when you are forced to skip lunch, and the hunger a concentration camp inmate feels doing hard labor on 500 calories of sawdust soup once a day. There is the pain of losing a pet and the pain of losing a parent. I will never forget reading Guy Sajer's THE FORGOTTEN SOLDIER -- the passage he writes about the difference between "exhaustion" as a civilian understands it, and the "exhaustion" a fighting man experiences during a terrible war.

When someone describes themself as "broken" after a disappointment, a betrayal, a defeat or an injury, I'm always tempted to answer, "In relation to what?"

When I was in high school, my father once did me the very great favor of explaining to me, after a crushing disappointment, that life was full of goddamned disappointments and a man was measured not by how many of them he endured but how he responded to them afterward. Life will give you endless reasons to quit, he said, and not many reasons to continue. On the other hand, quitting is a choice, and it is usually driven by a false sense of reality.

"When you are a toddler," he told me. "You fall down a lot. And when you fall, you cry -- not because of the pain, but because you think crying is what you're supposed to do when you fall. But sooner or later you realize falling is not the end of the world. In fact, it's no big deal. It's actually part of the process of learning to walk. Falling is supposed to teach us that each goal comes with a cost. The goal is going through life on your feet rather than on your knees, and the cost is the pain you feel when you land on your ass. It's the same when you learn to ride a bike, when you crush on girls, when you try out for a team or go on a job interview or apply to a school. You're bound to be rejected and disappointed sometimes, and when you are, you have a choice -- crawl and cry or get up and dust off and keep walking. The small setbacks prep us for the big ones, and if you avoid the small ones, the big ones, when they come, will seem like the end of the world."

The good news in this equation is that 9/10ths of the people who think they are broken, aren't. They just don't have any context for the pain and upset they are feeling. But as the Dead once sang, every silver lining has a touch of gray, and the trouble here is that very few people in our society are providing them any context. Instead, they get affirmation for their own diagnosis. Slightly damaged, they are told that, yes indeed, they are broken and isn't it a pity and don't they deserve sympathy and special treatment?

The fact is, I get scared as hell when I look at Twitter and see the number of people working themselves into a hysterical state because someone disagreed with or slightly displeased them. I get scared when people try to form Internet lynch mobs because they felt insulted by a Tweet or a Facebook post or some remark somebody made 15 years ago.
I get scared because one day there will be another Great Depression or World War or Influenza Pandemic and we will need everybody to roll up their sleeves and come together and pitch in to win the day... and nobody will show up because they're sobbing in a corner somewhere because they overhead someone use the wrong gender pronoun.

As Sherlock Holmes once said, “How can you build a foundation on such quicksand?”

The question is rhetorical, but I think I can provide an answer.

We are all of us in possession of our own internal landscape. Part of the landscape is born with us, part of it shaped by experience. It contains pristine lakes and beautiful mountains, and it also contains fetid swamps and canyons full of gila monsters. When we go exploring within ourselves, we can find beauty or ugliness, pleasure or pain. The proportions of each differ from person to person: some have a great deal of prime real estate and others, more desert or tundra or active volcanoes. Where we choose to stay -- where we build our foundation within ourselves -- is however up to us. If your landscape is mostly quicksand, that doesn't mean that's where you have to put your house. If you're a middle-aged person who feels inadequate to the slings and arrows of daily misfortune -- thin-skinned, oversensitive, weak, take your pick -- that doesn't mean you can't find a better vantage point within yourself. In short, if you feel broken, it doesn't mean you have to stay broken. And the very process of putting yourself back together may show you that you weren't broken in the first place. Just scuffed a bit. Dinged. Dented.

Ah, you say, that's all well and good. But what if I really am broken? What if my diagnosis was correct, and I as a human being am actually laying in pieces on the ground like the remains of a cheap vase dropped on a marble floor?

My answer to this is simple. Being broken, like falling down as a toddler, like getting chicken pox, like enduring the pain of a skinned knee or a burned finger for the first time, actually has a purpose when it occurs for real. We break because there were places within us unable to stand a particular strain. But this condition is not necessarily permanent. Hemingway famously remarked, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." He grasped that the very act of breaking, which were are taught to think of as shameful, can in fact be the first step to becoming a stronger person. One cannot fix a problem, after all, until one has admitted there is a problem, located it, and sketched a strategy for repair. But even this is impossible if one declares oneself broken after every setback, defeat or disappointment, if one's primary response to stressors is quitting or looking for pity. The difference between thinking one is broken and actually being broken is enormous, but not always readily visible, and understanding that difference is often the key to finding one's true inner strength.