You Are Not Built To Be Broken

I want to be healed. I want to be whole and happy and at peace.

For years, I thought pain and heartache and being broken was romantic. All of the TV shows and movies made it look like being broken wasn’t as excruciatingly painful as it is in reality, and when it did, it was just character development. Even the good cry you would have while watching Grey’s Anatomy every now and then didn’t seem that bad.

How absolutely fucked up is that? I knew this. It was something I caught on to when I was just becoming an adult, but it wasn’t something I consciously attributed to why I let myself continue to be broken for so long. I never thought that even if being shattered for a large amount of my short life was actually supposed to be ‘character development,’ it cannot and does not stop there. A character doesn’t develop if they never change.

So, I woke up.

I woke up at 4 a.m. one day last week and every fiber of my being needed a new direction. So I deleted every single social media app on my phone. Simple enough. Found a podcast to listen to on my way to my class that morning and found one to listen to on my way home. I started feeling like the universe gave me a direction that I wasn’t even aware of.

I pay attention to my feelings. If there is a problem? There’s already a solution, whether or not I am aware of it. I write gratitude lists 2-3 times a day, I tell my daughter she is an absolute miracle every day, and I breathe. Because you know what? I can fucking breathe.

It’s been a week of happy, but I cried for an hour before going downstairs and resetting. I still have bad moments. Why? I’m happy, this is it, this is what I needed. Evolving into the person your cells want to be is amazing, right? It is.

But evolving is also really fucking hard. It’s hard when someone closest to you doesn’t understand what you’re doing. It’s hard when it feels so much easier to crawl into the bathtub in the dark and sulk and feel your pain than it is to logically work through steps that haven’t become habit yet. It’s hard to evolve when you wake up in the morning and CNN or NPR has sent you 10 different and terrible news updates, because if the world is still broken, who are you to not be?

But the best part of this is that it leads to a better and healthier place.

I’m just a broken person healing in my own conscious way and sharing it with the internet. You are a broken person looking to the internet to help you out of your cracked shell – I know this because a week ago I was you. An hour ago I was you.

But I want to promise one thing:

You are not built to be shattered and hiding in beds or bathtubs or bottles of pills and alcohol. You are not built to lay down and take the world’s shit.

You are built to be whole. You are built to forage your own happiness. You are literally built to shed and grow every single second of every single day.

Your character development doesn’t end in pieces; your character development and your strength and your heart comes from crawling your way out of the bathtub, putting on clothes, drinking a glass of water, and telling yourself, “I deserve to be whole.”

And fucking doing something about it.