What To Do With Your Brokenness ✨

(bring it to me)

My lovely phone fell flat on its belly on the slate floor - SLAPP!!! - and shattered. It was the fourth day of our holiday by the seaside. I had already offered this slate floor the lives of a mug - CLINKSMSHHHH! - and a bowl.

On the beach at Lynmouth looking wistful

After my phone smashed, I spent a long time trying to remove the glass cover I had stuck onto the front to protect it. I refused to acknowledge the truth - that there was no glass cover, and that it was the screen itself that had combusted into slivers and shards. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who drops their beloved phone onto a slate floor, and I definitely didn’t want to be the kind of person that hadn’t deployed a screen protector.

It turns out that I am that person.

It turns out that I am all sorts of persons-that-I-would-rather-not-be. The kind of person that loses patience with their little dog. The kind of person that thinks about themselves first when a friend shares their bad news. The kind of person that doesn’t look after their ageing body very well. The kind of person who walks round town having left the keys in their car’s ignition. Twice.

I could go on.

Why am I writing to you today?

Partly, I like to confess. It’s a kind of coming clean, a putting-my-cards-on-the-table. There’s a strange and perverse pleasure in pointing out my flaws. Not the very worst ones, of course (see below).

Partly, I want sympathy. I like to optimistically imagine that you are thinking, ‘oh, everyone drops their phones from time to time’, or muttering something (probably correctly) about the perimenopause.

Partly, I hope that it will be useful for you to read about my clumsiness and my brokenness, because it might help you to feel better about your own.

More than anything else, though, I want to share some treasure that I have found.

Real love is a state where we allow ourselves to be seen clearly by ourselves and by others, and in turn, we offer clear seeing to the world around us. It is a love that heals. ~ Sharon Salzberg, from “Real Love”

This treasure is that when I see myself clearly¹ - with the soft and brilliant clarity of a mountain stream - I can love these messy, selfish, smashed-up parts of myself. I can know them to be loved.

I can see those shattered parts of you too, and love them. This is the love that heals.

Me Kaspa & the dogs with their noses (probably) in something smelly. Don’t look at the wall in the background or it might make you feel wonky.

On the drive home from Minehead we detoured to my mum’s house so she could give me my dad’s old phone - the one he had bought just months before his death. He had intended for her to have it but she preferred to keep her own, and so it had been sitting on her kitchen table since April - receiving junk texts and poking at her grief. She was happy for me to have it and to make use of it.

It is a good phone. It has a much better camera than my old one, and three times as much memory - I will be able to download new things without deleting old things. I have chosen a screensaver of translucent jellyfish. Whenever I pick it up, I think of my dad.

Sometimes there are silver-lining gifts that emerge from our brokenness.

Sometimes there are not.

Either way, we can trust that when we see brokenness with clear eyes we can see how very beautiful it is.

Go gently,
Satya <3

Tell me: Which shattered or wonky parts of you are difficult for you to see through clear, compassionate eyes? If it feels okay, write about them here and we will love them for you. If not, write about them in a secret place and know that dear Earth will love them for you instead.

One last holiday snap. RALPH!

1. According to Internal Family Systems clarity is one of the qualities of Self, which also has the qualities of compassion, curiosity, courage, confidence, creativity and connectedness.