break

Last month, Marianne M. Chrisos wrote this terrific post about why we hang onto things, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head.

There are things we never even thought to get rid of.

My bed frame broke this weekend. My bed is ten years old and the frame has cracked and broken about four or five times. It has been glued and screwed and nailed back together and I’ve continued to use it. Just a few days ago, it broke again. There’s no warning. I don’t have to be jumping on it or thrashing around mid-nightmare; I can look at it in a way it doesn’t appreciate, sit down, set a laundry basket on it, and it will decide to give way. So it broke again last week and Keith and I went through the tedium of moving the mattress and box spring and disconnecting the headboard and footboard from the frame and putting everything on the floor, like it was time for a slumber party in the living room. When I asked Keith when he’d be able to fix it, I realized maybe I didn’t want him to. I never would have thought to take my bed off of the frame had it not broken, but it’s easier this way, and I like the simplicity of it.

“Can I really throw this frame away? The footboard and everything?” I asked Keith.

“You can do whatever you want,” he told me.

You can do whatever you want.

If you've talked to me much lately, you may have noticed that this has been a theme of my conversation. Everyone I see asks me how I'm doing, and the answer is that life is a mixed bag. My psychiatrist told me yesterday that I have the most eventful life between appointments of all her clients. She begged me not to take up cliff-diving between now and January.

Life is very busy, but in spite of the thousands of words I have to write and students I have to tutor and stitches I have to knit in the next few weeks, there are spaces for loneliness and sorrow to creep in. There is a giant broken thing in the middle of my life. My automatic tendency is to figure out how to fix it so it feels like it did before, because that was normal. Comfortable. And yet this is the truth, which Marianne brings out so well:

Things don't have to be like they were or feel like they did before. 

Sometimes we get caught up in fixing what's broken without stopping to figure out whether the pre-broken thing was the best thing possible.

Sometimes when something breaks, it's a chance to re-evaluate, to do something new, if that seems right. Sometimes it's a blessing in disguise.

I'm in a place of huge transition in my life, and it's tempting to see so many things as broken and sad. They feel that way sometimes. But. All these places of brokenness are also places of opportunity. Places to grow, if I can be brave enough to see them.

I can rethink everything. Priorities, plans, deadlines. Locations. Purpose. Habits. I can start fresh.

On the good days, I feel the courage rising in me like flood water. On the good days, I know it to be true: I can do whatever I want.