So what do you do with a life when your heart lies in shattered piles of glass on the ground?
You cry.
Broken things need to be cared for, grieved over. You can't pretend the trauma didn't happen, you can't push it down and just carry on. You have to take the sad, broken things out of the pile at the back of your closet and bring them tenderly into soft morning light and grieve over them. You need to weep for your pain, for your broken dreams, for yourself.
It's now June, nine months after I wrote about the wreckage that was once my heart and how it was first broken into a million jagged pieces of shattered dreams. (In the post When a Glass Heart Shatters). And I think it is no coincidence that nine months after this accident I'm ready to revisit this topic and give an answer. Nine months, the amount of time it takes for a baby to be born with a new heart, or, as I see it, the amount of time it takes for a broken heart to be reborn new.
But a new heart is not reborn without work. At first you cannot even begin this work. You must live from one moment to the next. Trying to do otherwise is overwhelming. In my other post I spoke about instinctively knowing that forwards and backwards were not options. After a shattering the past is too painful. There is no going back. After a shattering the person you were and the life you had are broken and will never be the same again. Thinking about the past only reminds you of how painful and broken you are in comparison to the whole person you used to be and your reality cuts you all the deeper. The future is also too terrifying to contemplate; filled with unknowns and consequences that you know must arise from your shattering, but you do not have the courage to think about at first. Instinctively you know that you can only change directions, but with the sudden way that all your old plans shattered, all new things feel unsafe.
So until you are strong enough to face anything else, you live only in the now. Only living in this exact moment. That is how you survive until you are strong enough to face new things and the implications of the shattering you lived through. And you must keep crying. You must grieve for all your pains, all your losses. You must grieve in many different ways and you must allow yourself to feel as hurt as you are, pushing it down and pretending you are not hurt will not aid in your healing.
Then slowly with determination not to allow yourself to die in a heap in the gutter you pick yourself up. You stagger, you trudge one foot at time away. Anywhere. Just away from the wreckage. Maybe you go right, maybe you double back to the wreckage and go left. Maybe you fall a few feet away and cry. But every time you slowly pick yourself up and trudge one step further. You cling to family and friends for support. The ones that stick by you are the ones you cherish as true friends. Throughout this process of healing you will need them all the more.
And slowly in your stumbling steps you live in the moment and find that you notice things around you. It may be a funny shaped crack in the pavement, or a brightly coloured leaf that has caught your eye. You may notice a broken sign or a beautifully exuberant dog. Noticing the broken things will touch on your pain and gently, ever so gently you will start to think about those wounds and heal. Noticing the bright, beautiful and living things will slowly remind you of the beauty that can still be found in your world and you will gently begin to heal. Always in noticing and gentle reflection there is healing.
One day, after who knows how many months of grieving and living in the moment, your staggering steps will find a hint of a path. Just the beginning of one. You allow the love of family and friends to sustain you and you let them gently guide you towards a straighter path, pushing you gently towards something that almost looks like progress. It doesn't always look brave and big. Progress can be as small as admitting that your past is staying in the past. Progress can be admitting that you need to continue to stagger away from the wreck. Progress could be finding a flower growing from a crack in the sidewalk and letting yourself believe that there can be hope in a sea of despair. Or perhaps you just admit that you are still looking for answers, a way forward and you don't have them yet.
Looking eventually leads towards finding.
In September I decided I would curl up by the wreckage and wait for answers. That was as brave as my looking was capable of being at that time. I was waiting for God, for direction, for an answer for a start and a path. My path had shattered. I felt alone. But out of a stubborn determination not to let my brokenness consume me I got up and moved one step. Determination, and the love of family, and friends (and a few animals), kept me putting one foot in front of the other.
I admitted that my past was broken, that I was different. I found that I could still find a sad beauty in the world and I left the glass shards of my heart in the back corner of my mind until I was strong enough to deal with them.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't wake up one day and find myself strong enough to do it. I needed prodding and coaxing to even start. The friends who care about me have pushed me closer to the pile of shards. And some days I did a bit of clean up. Some days I honestly sat on the curb by the glass shards and sobbed, grieving the injuries and the events that led me to this state. Grieving for the wounds and the losses I've sustained. Slowly there were days where I was finally able to make halting progress of consolidation and tidying. I was starting to work on myself. I went to therapy, saw a doctor, started caring for myself, for my physical, mental and emotional well-being.
And I personally think that God must have been listening to my silent cry in September because I think he sent me the people I needed in my life in order for me survive it. He sent the right friends to be there for me. He sent steadfast friends who knew the depths of my pain. He sent me people to support me, cry with me, lift me up and love me.
Lastly, he sent me an artist. I didn't know I needed one until he arrived. God sent me an artist who saw all the broken pieces of my heart lying hopeless in the gutter and still found beauty in them. And so I sat beside my heap of jagged, broken pieces of heart and I decided to grieve the injuries done to them and finally start to straighten up the mess.
When my artist would see a new wound I would see a sadness in his face that finally allowed me to feel as though I could openly grieve the deepest cuts. I couldn't always see the beauty in my brokenness that he saw, but I was tired of avoiding the scene of the gutter and leaving that mess hanging around to loom over me and shadow my days. So, slowly, ever so slowly, I picked up small pieces of jagged glass flung far out into the street and I grieved over them and put them in the main pile, consolidating. One piece of glass at a time I tried to straighten up the carnage of my broken heart and dreams.
Cleaning up such an accident is more of a journey than a task. It involves grief, and pain and it's a long painstaking process. And when a heart has broken in such a dramatic fashion your body builds knots of emotional walls around it to try to prevent the damage from spreading. So, you have to spend time carefully unraveling the knots of distrust, broken promises and other hastily constructed emotional walls in order to even come close enough to start cleaning up the scene of the accident. This process is painful, but it is necessary for healing.
Some days you make real progress, you find a way to take three steps forward; you deliberately pull down small portions of the walls you worked so hard to build. But there are also days where the emotional pain is too much and you kick pieces of your heart further into the gutter in frustration, despair and black misery.
But sitting beside me, bending down to reach into the gutter, not shying away from the dirt, jagged edges and misery is the artist that was sent to me. Every time I fell he picked me up. He grieved with me. He took the broken pieces of my heart that I kicked into a corner. He gathered them up gently and he told me that light shines through the cracks where the heart has been broken before.
He helped me go searching for words I could speak to my fear. We embarked on a journey together; going through the Artist's Way which has taught me enough to be the subject of many future posts. For now, however, it is worth mentioning that it is teaching me to practice gentle self-care and to speak back against the dark, doubting thoughts of fear in my mind.
My artist helped me find my words for safety by always being a safe place for my emotions to rest and by searching with me for the right words to fight back against the darkness. I found them in an unexpected place. Alongside my Artist, I had the privilege of hearing a Mayan Tribal Elder speak at a Cocoa Ceremony where she spoke about the tribulations of her people. She said "We do not admit that we were conquered. We were invaded, yes, but not conquered. They may have tried to kill us. They buried us. But they didn't know they were planting seeds." The moment I heard these words I began to cry. These were the words I had been searching for to bring the piece of hope I couldn't find on my own.
How does one live in a world where bad things happen, where you know they can happen at any time to you, and still feel safe? Here is where I find safety. That whatever bad things may come, whether or not they kill me, they will only be planting seeds. I may not be the same after. But I will grow back, I will be stronger. I am unstoppable. And in this lies my safety.
On this journey, my Artist helped me notice the beautiful things. As time went on he kept showing me the beautiful things in life, in the little moments as well as the big ones. Every time I saw beauty in the world I would discover a small piece of my heart that wasn't completely broken. The mess in the gutter was less daunting. And slowly, he helped me gather all the pieces together with love. He melted the broken pieces of my heart back together and he added new material, new glass, and my heart is now encased in this protective case of new glass that has no memory of fragility and is therefore stronger than ever. And the cracks in the old pieces of my heart shine with the tenderness of empathy that brokenness pours into a heart.
I am old and new. No, you cannot undo the brokenness, but you can decide what happens next. I have found a seed at the bottom of the shattered heap and with the heat from a forge I have brought forth a tiny plant, my heart a Phoenix rising from the wreckage. And my new heart, born with work and patience was given so much love by friends and family that I can never adequately express my gratitude to those who gave it.
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