If you feel broken...
A Guide To Coming Back From The Brink
I was with a dear friend going through a really rough moment recently. It’s utterly humbling to be with someone you love in these moments. When you know you’d do anything in the world to make it better. But all you can do is be there.
It affected me deeply, and I wanted to help in some way. For that reason, I started writing the passages below.
I know that we can’t do it for others. There is a point of breaking relevant to our lives that only we live through. And it is our journey to discover what we are meant to discover there.
But in hand with this, I’ve been rescued by the love of others. In fact, if it weren’t for my breaking, I would never have been able to take in the love of others in such a way. That’s how that love gets in.
In our breaking, we have no use for complicated ideas. And it’s for that reason that I’ve made every effort to crystalise the ideas that have either helped - or been revealed to me - through the experience of breaking.
When I think of the three epochs of great trauma in my life, it still makes me shudder. The loss of my mother as a teenager, the edge of madness in my twenties, and the sudden exit of a partner on the doorstep of our future.
I also know there is no me in the form I am without these times. Being on our knees brings us to the heart of life, the centre of ourselves, and to who we might be.
For me, my creative life was born out of suffering. But it transformed into something far more powerful: the guide who walks with me and reveals to me the meaning of things.
I’ve understood that to be broken is not something permanent but part of a cycle.
We are broken into a new form.
And then we are distributed.
That’s its purpose.
Below is a set of passages for anyone who is in a moment of breaking.
Please know you are not alone.
You. Are. Not. Alone.
With love,
Jim
Passage Titles
Why are we broken
Nihilism is a form of narcissism
The way out is in.
Why the breaking is healing
The nature of shedding skin
You are not in a labyrinth
Humility before all things
What about what can’t be fixed?
Stuckness is Your Orientation
The Path is Where You Stand
It is darkest before dawn
You will not be as you have been before
1. Why Are We Broken?
Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack in everything; that is how the light gets in.”
When we become fixed, there are no cracks in us.
When you get broken, it is not simply because life is a sadist.
It has a purpose.
This purpose is to reassemble us anew.
Its needle is pain.
And its thread, light.
The new version of us is no longer as fixed as we once were.
Instead, it is permeable.
It enables interflow, where things pass in and are allowed out.
We dismay at our breaking.
But our breaking is our revelation.
Herald it.
It is how the light enters us through the cracks.
2. Nihilism is a Form of Narcissism
Nihilism is our excuse to stop trying.
We tell ourselves, "Nothing matters, so why bother?"
And so sets in the quiet decay of giving up on life.
It’s an easy out, letting us believe we’re unique in facing a world devoid of good.
In truth, we're merely shirking the humility life asks of us.
That is why nihilism so often precedes our breaking.
Because nihilism is a dead end, and clashes against the essence of living.
We dig in, shouting it’s not a choice; it’s a condition.
Life's rebuttal?
The flash of the firefly. The gleam of the dew. The silence of the stars.
As long as you’re alive, you’re in the game.
Nihilism puts us on a pedestal; nothing is more self-aggrandising.
Yet, life’s first lesson? That we bow before it.
That means the humility to do the smallest thing before us.
Because the tools to fix our lives are found in what we most want to avoid.
3. The Way Out Is In
When we are broken, everything in us wants to get out of it.
But a friend relayed this nook of wisdom said by his brother:
What if the way out is in?
We don’t get to where we want to go by retreating from it.
But by going through it.
The way out is not out.
The way out is in.
4. Why the breaking is healing
For me, the awful thing has never been the breaking itself.
It has been the holding up of the dam beforehand.
Once the dam breaks, things can flow through you again.
And in passing through, old things filter out, leaving crystalline transparency.
I’m never closer to life’s meaning than in these moments.
You dread the breaking until the breaking itself.
But its arrival is indistinguishable from epiphany.
Because it is when the insight comes.
We are no longer burdened by the extraordinary effort it takes to continue pretending that things are not right.
We are not released from something but to something.
Or rather, to be something.
That is why the breaking is not just the beginning of healing.
But an invitation into an unknown version of ourselves.
Deeper in our knowledge of the depths.
Unafraid to light a torch in its cavern.
5. The Nature of Shedding Skin
You are shedding skin, and the one that emerges hurts because it is sensitive.
Open to things in a new way.
What will impress upon it?
The serpent is perhaps the most misunderstood of all mythological symbols.
Even in the Garden of Eden, it is represented as evil, as an emblem of temptation.
Yet its deeper meaning is of transformation.
The version of you today will not fit the potential version of you tomorrow.
Thus, the skin is shed.
Your pain today is that you are in the act of becoming.
Shedding one thing.
To become another.
Just remember: metamorphosis requires going through the stages of metamorphosis.
The dread of change.
The decay of the old.
The discarding of the dead.
The vulnerability of the new.
The availability of new life.
6. You are not in a Labyrinth.
When we are lost we feel we are going in circles.
But you are not in a labyrinth.
You are in a wood.
Sure, you may have to get more lost than you anticipated.
But there IS an exit.
The paradox is that to find your way out, you have to get more lost, not less lost.
To do this, you must dive into the unknown, even deeper than you knew before.
Yes, there are beasts to face.
They're not there to devour you but to show you who you can be by facing them.
At the last, the dragon becomes not our nemesis, but our guide.
7. Humility Before All Things
Light reaches me in surrender.
When I know that I cannot fix my problems or pain by wishing them away.
Humility before the world is acceptance of the problem.
It feels like being reduced, but there is something beautiful in this, too.
I am not too vast to tackle my problems.
And so I start at the start.
At the smallest possible thing I can find.
I open my box—not Pandora’s, mine.
Addressing issues one by one, a chain reaction begins.
Following this path, things improve.
This moment moves through time to that moment.
Within, magic.
The magic of growth.
The mystery of change.
The unfolding of potential.
I am not broken.
I am in the process of becoming.
8. What About What Can’t Be Fixed?
Yes, there are certain things which can’t be just “fixed”.
People get sick.
Loved ones pass.
Partners leave us.
But there is growth available even in this.
Maybe more than any other.
Our truest potential emerges only when woven with the suffering in the heart of existence.
The tragedy is not the tragedy.
It just IS.
Yes, we feel it.
Yes, it breaks us.
Yes, we must allow it to break us.
Deeper, deeper it draws us into ourselves, into the heart of all things.
Reconciling with things as they are is the beginning of power.
All the man-made forms of power diminish in comparison.
It is only beyond the fear, when the fear merges with the fabric of your being itself, that it is no longer of any consequence.
That which threatens you doesn’t kill you; it becomes you.
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
Joseph Campbell
9. Stuckness is Your Orientation
What we avoid is the very thing that most wants to teach us.
Our instinct is to return to safety.
But that safety is the known; it has nothing left to teach you.
You have been thrown from it for a reason.
Of course, it feels uncomfortable.
Because when we are lost our instinct is to fragment.
It is time to rejoin yourself.
To halt.
To feel the earth on your feet.
It is only in stopping that you realise where you’re at.
You look out.
See the lay of the land.
Orientate.
How could you have plotted a course before?
You were in permanent movement.
Stuckness is not a curse.
It adapts us to a new environment.
Everything begins from this foundation.
Your stuckness is your orientation.
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
Pema Chöndrön
10. The Path is Where You Stand
Our instinct is to run when things fall apart.
What if this is exactly where you are meant to be?
It often feels like the hardest thing in the world.
To accept this as it is now.
We spend too much of our lives busy, in the exhale.
But this moment now is the inhale.
Yes, some lessons we learn through activity.
But others we must allow to arrive.
What is life teaching you in this moment?
How can you know it if you are always in a blur of movement?
There are a million paths before you.
You will never know the right course.
But you can choose the course that is most right for you now.
In Pema Chöndrön’s words, you will be in this moment until it has taught you what it needs to teach you.
Let it.
11. It is Darkest Before Dawn
No matter how dark this moment is, it is part of a cycle.
We want to rush from it.
Before receiving the lesson it is trying to teach us.
We cannot hasten the dawn.
But we can trust it will come.
If that is so, the greatest courage is then to trust the moment you are in.
Yes, take solace that light returns as a cycle.
But remember:
Transformation happens in the dark.
Lazarus has no story without his cave.
Do not deprive yourself of yours.
Even a cave has a place.
You will emerge.
Not as you were.
But as you might be.
Trust the dark.
It is darkest before dawn.
“I don’t know if such pain improves us, but I do know it deepens us.”
Nietzsche
12. You Will Not Be As You Were Before
It is our instinct to want to go back.
To be as we were.
But “as we were” is not our opportunity.
Our opportunity is who we might be.
It is scary to be in this, our changed space.
And sometimes we would do anything not to be here, in this, our life, as it is, now.
But it is in this changed space where all the world is available to us.
Not as it was, but as it might be.
It is hard to accept, but the world is asking you to step into a new version of you.
But the paradox is that though you want to escape, it is here you must do the work.
You resist it with all your heart.
And fall into the trap that everything else gets to change, but you only ever stay the same.
What you miss is that your breaking is itself your renewal.
The parts of you are scattered to be reconstituted.
And the only certainty is that you will be a broader being than the one you were.
Nietzsche said, “I don’t know if such pain improves us, but I do know it deepens us.”
I would counter:
The deepening is the improvement.
It’s three weeks now, since you wrote this, and I‘m still taking my time to overthinking what you said. Reading the words every day and continuing to find the similarities. Your path was leading you through a field of flowers and mean bugs. Leaving the bugs alive and enduring their poison is whats so hard, but leads you to find joy in the flowers again. Simple, I know, but the work you did to become this human and artist is only yours. And mine is mine.
thank you for sharing this with us x