Remodeling

People love that cliche, time heals all wounds. But live long enough and you'll realize that most cliches are true. It's amazing what even the smallest passage of time can accomplish, the cuts it can close, the imperfections it can smooth over. But in the end, it comes down to the size of the wound, doesn't it? If the wound is deep enough , there might be no way to keep it from festering, even if you have all the time in the world. -Being Human, US

The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. -A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway



Several times, he's said that he's broken. On good days, he says he feels like he may be healing, or that he may only be bent, not broken. When I ask him how or why he thinks this, what it is that he finds wrong with himself now, I never really know what to do with his answers. What he describes sounds rather normal for the people I've known in my life, nothing too extreme, especially considering what he's been through in the last year or so. Some of the things, like not really being able to tell when someone is being genuine or when they are actually trying to get something out of you, are how I feel all the time. Hell, they're how I feel about him sometimes. This is not to say that I don't support him being whoever or however he wants to be. I wholeheartedly do. It's just very far from my lived reality and that of most people I know. It also makes me wonder if we would be suited to each other, long-term, if what he thinks of as broken is what I consider normal.

And while I understand how it might feel like being broken for someone in his position, with his life experience, that terminology really gets under my skin. Just like "broken home" or "broken family." While talking to my therapist a few weeks ago, I put the word in air quotes and she insisted "But we are from broken homes." (She's a child of divorce too.) I didn't have words to express how and why I thought she was wrong, why calling my family broken made me angry, but I did and still do.

So I've been thinking quite a bit about being broken the last few days. As is usually the case, I couldn't think of a good response in the moment, but I am trying to develop one now. Maybe he is right that those things he describes are broken-ness and that my therapist is right about me being from a broken home. For the sake of the rest of this post, let's just assume that they are. It's not the kind of broken that occurs when a plate slips through your fingers and shatters on the floor, where no amount of gluing will restore it to it's previous usefulness again. It feels more like a broken bone, where your body can heal it naturally, with time and proper care, though how close it functions to it's previous state will also depend on how well it is re-set.

I looked up bone fractures on Wikipedia. If I'm reading it right, first, you get a blood clot between the fragments, then new blood vessels grow around the clot. The blood vessels bring the collagen which stiffens and becomes the bone matrix. Then a process called remodeling replaces the initial bone matrix with more mature bone. It usually takes about 18 months but is 80% of normal within 3 months in most adults. I can almost picture the blood then collagen then bone filling up the small space of the fracture, making what was a gap now whole again.

So, yes, I've been broken in many places, many times. I will be again. But when my family "broke" under the strain of a cheating and abusive spouse, my grandparents, my uncle, and, a little while later, my step-dad wove the broken places back together. I would not trade the closeness we shared as an extended family for a unbroken nuclear family. The rest of the broken-ness, well, sometimes you don't expect anything to every bridge that gap, to ever bind the pieces back together. Sometimes it doesn't for years and years. And then one day you realize that you can use that arm or leg again, just like a normal person, That years after a traumatizing robbery, you can walk alone to your car or down the street, without your heart racing. That after months of forcing yourself to hang out with friends, you find that you like doing it, that you miss seeing those people when you don't get the chance to for awhile. (Ok, so that comes and goes. The remodeling may have made the bone as strong, but the bone was never really a people person.) That two years after your last big loss, you can sometimes talk about it without even tearing up. Maybe you also find that the bones didn't heal exactly how they used to be, but that you are alright with that. Maybe you even like it better that way, because it reminds you that you'll never be the person you started out as, for better and for worse, though hopefully more for the better than for the worse.

Then again, I've also done some breaking on purpose. Tattoos, piercings, and scars are not how our bodies were originally, but I'm happy with them. In fact, I want more. I don't date how people are supposed to and I disclose too much too soon to everyone. There are a bunch of other things that society at large says that a healthy person doesn't do, but that I do openly and gladly. So I guess I also accepted a long time ago that I am broken, at least by most standards out there. Many times, I heal. I can bring those broken pieces back together and I find the remodeling to be sorta amazing. The rest of the times, I just develop new strategies for dealing with things while broken. Even if that means I'm too broken for most people, once they aren't broken anymore.

Gary Allan- Pieces

I've been broken, torn and scattered
I've loved holy, I've loved sin
I was rolling on the wind
It didn't matter

I was so sure of who I didn't want to be
Every smile and every fear
Every laugh and every tear
It was all mine, it was all me

Chorus:
Pieces of my heart
Pieces of my soul
Pieces that I'm gonna be
I don't even know
I gave a lot to lovers
Gave a lot to friends
Everything I took from them
Made me who I am
Pieces

We've all been lied to
We've all been liars
Nothing's perfect in this world
Everybody's been burned by the fire
Guess I'm learning
That what breaks you, makes you grow
But I'm not hiding where I've been
Gonna let the light shine in
What I don't need
Gonna let that, let that, let that go

Chorus:
Pieces of my heart
Pieces of my soul
Pieces that I'm gonna be
I don't even know
I gave a lot to lovers
Gave a lot to friends
Everything I took from them
Made me who I am
Pieces

Pieces, the good and the bad
Pieces, the happy and sad
Pieces, the wrong and the right
Pieces, that's my, that's my, that's my life

Chorus:
Pieces of my heart
Pieces of my soul
Pieces that I'm gonna be
I don't even know
I gave a lot to lovers
Gave a lot to friends
Everything I took from them
Made me who I am
Pieces