Being broken is better than whole

…create a mosaic of your shards

Broken promises. Broken hearts.

As a wordsmith I like to fixate on the word and its emotional resonance.

When you are financially broke, you are bankrupt and have a desire to be replenished and restored to monetary comfort.

When an object is broke, it is fragmented or shattered and lacks its original value and is often discarded rather than repurposed.

Wholeness, it seems, is better. It is associated with completion, and unity and all the good stuff that makes the world go round.

What constitutes a broken person and do broken people raises broken people? Theories abound. Check into Reddit or Quora for the latest pop psychologists waxing on about this phenomena.

From the pulpit, the priests told me and a generation of Catholic school girls we were inherently broken because we sinned and had to be fixed in the confessional by priests who were depraved.

School systems in recent years told parents that broken children need mood-altering drugs and stabilizers to make them more compliant.

Even dog owners are told that their dogs that bark or dig or do anything canine-like were trainable by shock collars or other punitive measures.

A heart is broken because someone’s ideas about romance or friendship were betrayed in a way that hurt the other person intentionally or not.

As Boy George sang: “Do you really want to hurt me?”

Broken, in short, is anything that doesn’t meet anyone’s expectations for what is correct and proper and personally or socially acceptable.

When restoring my sense of wholeness is not available, I know I get angry. I do not like the broken pieces, the unfixable after shocks. The missing links are salt in my wounds.

Our mind likes order; it likes neat compartments. Clutter creates cognitive overload and mental fatigue.

But a broken heart , as the song writers tell us, does not break evenly. Broken dreams and expectations do not evaporate. Instead they hang like a dense fog in our mind. We loop the “what ifs” over and over again and the elusive wholeness is just out of grasp.

Instead, I think I am going to take the broken pieces and look at the possibilities that abound to use them to make something new, using the shards like a creative palette.

While restoration of what was may not be possible, creation of something new is. Rather than being broken, we can be reborn.