Sarah Morgan

Healthcare Geek.
Professional Communicator.

serendipity

On Falling and Being Broken

A romantic calls it falling in love. Note the preposition. Falling in. If you’re lucky it can feel like that – like falling into something – but it’s also like falling away. Making a conscious decision to spread-eagle and fall – away from fear, away from logic, away from what you’d been used to.

Also note that perfect metaphor: falling. Your guts shifting, the flood of adrenaline spreading outward. Falling from a height does feel the same as emotional falling.

It’s always scary, it’s sometimes unwise, but sometimes, falling away from structure is a good thing. Sometimes you can see that you were hiding yourself in it. (Check this article from the founding editor of Lucky.) Sometimes you have to fall and break to see what exactly is the shape in which you were meant to be. It helps you know what shape you want to keep trying to assemble yourself into.

This is a lifelong process.

Stop running from your broken heart, says Glennon Melton. Wonderful advice. Perhaps also the most ridiculously hard advice I’ve ever heard. Stop running from your brokenness?

What else is life?

I am broken. I am broken by fear and shame and guilt. I have hard edges and prickly corners and immature gooey spots. I know you’re broken too. I get that. That should make it feel okay. But it doesn’t.

Why doesn’t it feel okay?

I don’t like to let anybody in because it hurts to inevitably be disappointed. I don’t want to let anybody in because it hurts to inevitably disappoint them.

Why does imperfection feel like the end of the world?

We use words, we need words, words are what make us human, but words are also what make us inhuman. Words are the knives and fists and intercontinental ballistic missiles we throw at each other, and perhaps worse, words are walls and moats and escape pods.

Why do we use the things that should connect us to push us apart? 

Perhaps if falling is the thing that breaks us each apart, falling could also be the thing that makes us come together.

I’m not sure.

This isn’t one of those ones where I know what I’m talking about. 

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