Being Broken
Life gives us many opportunities to break. In pain and fear, in loss, grief and failure we are torn open. Or we learn to close ourselves off from that. We learn not to care. Why choose to suffer when you can protect yourself by the simple method of not giving a shit? Why let the opinions and feelings of others affect you? Why love anything enough to risk being wounded by losing it?
I’ve spent a fair bit of time now watching the people who protect themselves from pain. I’ve had some pretty close contact with that approach. The people who cannot hear that they are wrong because they will not subject themselves to the pain of shame. The people who protect themselves by not caring, and who fear love. None of them were actually all that happy.
There is always a balance, always a trade-off. The person who protects themselves from humiliation struggles to learn anything. You can’t progress if you have to believe that you are already perfect. The person who does not care lives a life that is short of warmth. If you do not love then you miss out on a lot. Perhaps you feel less pain, but you feel less joy as well. The people who avoid risk in the hopes of minimising suffering also avoid opportunities to live.
Out there in the normal world, people will ridicule you for feeling too much, for caring, for weeping over that which is awful, for grieving over loss. We’re supposed to get over it and move on. Bereavement should be tidied up in a matter of weeks. The loss of friends, homes, jobs, security, health and prospects… we’re supposed to shrug it off and not inconvenience other people with our pain. What this means in practice is that we are taught to hide what we feel, and to lie about it. I’ve been there and I have the t-shirts. For a huge, personal catastrophe, you might get a couple of weeks of grace, if you are lucky.
People who do not grieve their losses (and not just the dead) do not get to heal. People who are not allowed to break, take far more damage on the inside and far longer to recover. Rates of depression and anxiety are soaring, but we don’t ask why, and we certainly don’t look hard enough at the bat-shit crazy culture and assumptions that might be underpinning that. It is a terrible thing to lose your health, or your job. It is awful when relationships break down. It is gutting when the goalposts are moved unfairly, when the system itself turns on you, when there is cruelty without justice, when there is sheer bad luck. And then you’re supposed to pretend all is fine.
If you are allowed to break, you are also allowed to heal. If you are allowed to own your distress, you are also allowed to ask for help. If you are able to feel all the shitty, humiliating things, you are able to learn how to rise above them. If you are able to feel the pain, you are also able to feel the joy and love. Yet it remains socially unacceptable to break, even when your life is in ruins.
