I’m trying to accept that there’s no fix for a broken heart, no cure for unanswered questions.
Dearest Doodle Soupsters,
The artwork above is called, “Don't call me damaged, I am raw and beautifully so” …
I don’t know what I’m about to write. I just know I have something to say.
How many times did I have something to say yet no space to find the words?
I don’t know how to make sense of having something now that I needed for a really long time. Even when change is good, change can be scary. But it’s more than that …
I think I’m trying to sort out the fact that where I came from, what I grew up with, that the trauma is all real AND I am not what happened to me AND what happened to me affects me AND I have the power to heal AND I can’t force my healing to be faster or easier or more straightforward.
I think I’m trying to accept that there’s no fix for a broken heart. There’s only gathering the pieces and kissing each one and you put yourself back together again and make something beautiful from the shards.
I don’t know how to accept that there isn’t some cure for unanswered questions. I want to ask my abusers why they did it. I want to know the answer. I want to know why people do bad things. I’m trying to find a neat answer for a question that philosophers, artists, scientists, songwriters, and psychologists have been asking from the birth of their fields. I don’t know if there is an answer. There probably isn’t.
I watch TV shows (Blacklist, currently). I read. I think. I wonder. I stare out the window. I walk. I come back home. I study the ceiling. I type my questions into the search bar of my browser. I don’t even know why I want to know. I guess everyone just wants to understand their life experiences, regardless of how that manifests for them?
Why do people do bad things?
Why rape? Why betray? Why harm? Why?
No matter how many ways I look at this question, I can’t think of anything that fully explains it.
Why not love, instead?
I would say that bad things happen and people do bad things to deal with it. But that doesn’t explain why so many people do good things to deal with the bad things that happened to them. It doesn’t explain why so many people seek out meaning and beauty instead of revenge and cruelty.
We can be the wildflowers that sprout from the cracks in the sidewalk.
I say that I’m tired and I am, but I’m also just sitting in all these questions and they’re heavy. Sometimes, I just need to watch a TV show that embodies the questions or listen to a song and just focus on that. In the quiet, I feel all of it. I feel so sad and angry and confused about where I came from and what I survived … how different my life is now. I want to celebrate who I am and what I’ve overcome and all the progress I’ve made in healing — I do. I just don’t know how to do that, right now.
Right now, I’m just a human with so many heavy questions about what makes us who we are and why people make the choices they make and why people close to me chose what they chose and what makes them who they are and I wonder if at some point they became who they are and why and when and how and how bizarre it feels, to want to save the people who abused you and I wonder if you can save people from themselves and I know you can’t and what does that even mean …
I guess, right now, I just want to share the broken parts. I want to show you my shards and just let them be seen. I want to kiss my wounds and let them just be wounds for as long as they need to be. The art will come. The beauty will arrive. Just like spring, right? It will make sense somehow, even as at the same time, it will probably never really make sense.
I am a wildflower and I’ve traveled a long, long way from the cracks in the sidewalk, from underneath where I was once trapped. I don’t know where I’m going. I’ll get there anyway. And at the same time, I do know. Wherever I go, I’ll be me and I choose.
I choose:
Love
Rest
Healing, even when it’s messy, confusing, hard, frustrating, even when it feels too slow, even when it feels too fast
My path
My chosen family
Art
Music
Writing
Nature
Wisdom
To find beauty in struggle and to let the struggle be what it is too
Hope
To let myself cry
Hugs
To see reality
To listen
Curiosity
Balance
Ebb and flow
Me
To trust that there are more possibilities than I can see right now
To trust myself to figure it out as I go
To let myself receive support and care
To give support and care
To let myself be messy and complicated
To try my best
To show up
To slow down
To find my pace by paying attention to my body
To try my best to let go of hypervigilance
To try my best to let go of rigidity
To trust that we’re going to be okay
Honesty
Raw and beautifully so,
Nicole Sylvia Javorsky
P.S. Today's reflection question: What do you choose?