LQ McDonald III I see you out there. Picking up the pieces of your life with that red-faced look of shame and that faint shine of tears that is swelling in your eyes. I can hear the thoughts swirling in your head, as well. The poison words you tell yourself when you make a mistake. I fucked up again. I will never get this right. I should just give up. I will never make this work.
I can see and hear you because I live in that space. The dark, dangerous corners of our minds that throws shadows on the possibility of accomplishment and joy. I live there in that space, with the taunting voices in my head and the broken fragments of my life pieced together like a puzzle that doesn’t quite seem to fit, and I cry my own tears and curse my own actions because no matter how much work I try to do to make myself whole, I always feel a bit broken and I always find a way to fuck up the beautiful.
But that’s ok. I have come to accept that space. Because I also inhabit another expanse that I think you do as well. A capacity for confidence and pride and of great, growing things that spring fresh and beautiful from all the things I try to do to make the world a better place.
I can sometimes look inside myself and I can run my fingers over the cracks and chips and broken little pieces inside my heart and feel an overwhelming sense of charity, compassion, and love for the beauty I have been able to hold with such a damaged vessel.
It comes and goes. And my focus wavers between the two parts of myself that I so struggle to handle. And through this struggle, I have realized something. In order to truly appreciate the person that I am; the person that I have become today, I must be equally understanding and accepting of what is broken inside as much as what is beautiful. I think we all have to come to terms with those two sides of our souls.
Recognize The Whole
Some people are only going to look at pieces of you, never seeing the whole. They will grab onto your broken things and they will decide that is all that you are. Others will grab the beautiful things of you and decide that is all you are. The problem is, they are not seeing you entire. You are neither completely broken nor completely beautiful. You are a little bit of both. And as soon as you come to terms with that, you can begin to be everything that you are.
That is also how we should come to view others. We should make a great effort to rummage around in the souls of the people that are close to us and feel for the jagged edges of their being that have not yet been weathered by time and experience. We should run our hands lightly over these sharp parts of them and recognize how they might impact the way that they are.
This is not a call to try to sand down the sharp points of someone’s heart, it is a call to be aware of them and acknowledge them as a distinct and important part of that person. Something that must come with having them in your life at all. It is a call to be sympathetic to the past hurts and poisons that can damage the mind and heart of someone because you are able to recognize how your own past has come to break certain parts of you.
But we must also come to cherish and shelter the beautiful things we find in people and ourselves. Those shiny belongings that pull us in and attract our attention. These are the things we should help to keep polished and glistening. Those are the things that demand our nurturing so they two do not become broken by a world that will do it’s best to crack us all.
We Don’t Have To Give The World Everything Inside You
There are things living inside you that you will never show the world. And thank god that you don’t. There are ugly things like revenge and madness and jealousy and rage. Festering, disgusting things inside you that smell like piss and shit and blood and venom. Those things should not often see the light of day but they should be recognized and investigated because they come from somewhere broken in you and make you who you are.
No one is so enlightened that they don’t have some ugly deep inside them. As Oscar Wilde once said;
“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
The best we can hope to do is make the beautiful parts of us the parts that most often touch the world. If you can do that, if you can diminish the shadows that twist inside you and darken the rest of the world, you are doing more than most and you will make the world just that much brighter.
Love Whats Broken and Polish What’s Beautiful
If you look closely enough at yourself and your life I think you can recognize what is beautiful and what is broken. When we find the shattered parts we want so often to run from them, hide them, shove them under the bed and pretend like they don’t live inside of us, but doing that will never let them be fixed.
We fix what’s broken by spending time with it. By caring enough about it that we would suffer through the potential pains of getting cut trying to put it back together again. We fix it by loving it so much that we are willing to spend the time required to make it whole again. That is what we should see when we see the broken things inside us.
What’s more, we should work hard to make the beautiful things inside us gleam like mirrors in the sun. We should spend a great amount of our time polishing and cleaning the beautiful things that we are and presenting them to the world like glowing beacons beckoning the rest of the world to our shores.
Summary
The point of all my meandering writing is to say that we should recognize the complexity that exists in each and every one of us. Recognize the pain and pleasure, the sadness and joy. Recognize that we are all such tangled webs of insecurity and confidence, and the best that we can do is not be too hard on ourselves or others when we brush up against the sharp, broken pieces of our hearts and we cause accidental pain.
It is also about cherishing and nurturing the beautiful things in yourself and others. Digging them out so they sit atop the broken pieces and making sure that the part of you that most touches the world is the part of you that you that is the most magnificent.
But most of all, it’s about accepting. Accepting that you are not going to find anyone in this world who is not a little damaged or who doesn’t have at least a little something breathtaking inside of them. The joy is in the searching. So keep your eyes and heart open and try to find the little bit of everything that exists in everyone.
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