“If you’re broken, you don’t have to stay broken.”
Selena Gomez (love her) ended her moving American Music Awards (AMAs) speech with this very powerful statement, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since the words sunk into my brain.
What does it mean to be broken? I feel like for everyone this could mean many different things. When I think of being broken I think of the loss of a really great, important, and valuable part of yourself. I think of being lost with no one or nothing to help you find your way back home, so as a result you just sort of sink into a deep depression.
When I think of broken I think of putting your all into something or someone, giving it or them everything that you have, and not getting what you have hoped you would get out of it in the end. So, naturally you feel like a failure, a complete loser and choose to beat yourself up over it instead of accepting that some things happen that are out of our control.
And no matter how much hard work you put into something the fact of the matter is that you can’t play God and see to it that everything is as you want it to be. Sometimes we just have to let it be. Which means sometimes you have to accept the bad over the good in order for the good to claim victory another day.
So how do we recover from being broken? Well to be honest, I think the best form of recovery is acceptance of what has happened and having the strength to just simply move on. But this is another thing that I believe is different for everyone.
However, from personal experience I think we all go through certain steps in our own time as a way of recovering from that feeling of being broken. These are steps that are most familiar to me:
- Sadness: we are sad all the time
- Anger: we have a lot of pent-up anger
- Release: we find a way to release that anger and sadness
- Acceptance: we accept what has happened
- Guidance: we look for ways to get back on track
- Solitude: we reach a place of peace and happiness
Being broken is no fun feat. We all have been there, some more than others, but regardless we all know that gut wrenching feeling of being broken. And if I’m being honest we’ll all have more times when we are broken because we are human. We experience life in a way that plays on our emotions, which are tied to our thoughts, and influence our actions. We are human before we are powerful, weak, male, or female. So, we will be broken more than once in our life (sorry folks that’s just the way it is).
When we break, we experience great sadness. A sadness that we often times have built up in our head the idea that no one understands the way we feel, when in fact others do. They may not be able to personally relate to the way a particular experience brought to life that specific emotion, but they can relate enough to at least be a shoulder to lean on.
And when you have that shoulder, don’t push it away. It may be the one thing that brings you comfort for the time being.
I believe that the older we get, the more life we experience, and the more equipped we are to combat those broken moments. We bounce back a lot easier because we’ve experience it enough times to know the process that works for us. We learn how to work through our sadness. May it be going to the gym, binging on a bunch of romantic movies, spending extra time with your friends, indulging in a big bucket of vanilla ice cream, or even finding comfort in being around your family more than usual.
The older we get the better we become at finding the rainbow in our tears and faster ways to get to it.
The feeling of being broken can also be accompanied by anger. I can’t say for certain that this statement holds true for everyone, but I know it holds true for me. Sometimes when I feel broken I’m angered by what caused it and angry at myself for allowing it.
This anger stage looks different for everyone.
This often comes in the form of me just completely isolating myself from everyone because I’m usually always in a bad mood. I believe we feed off the energy of others, I don’t want others to be in a bad mood because I am in one. Instead, I want to be by myself so that I can let off that steam in private. So, that I can mentally say all the things I need to say in order to clear a path for realization about what has happened, so that I can be guided to my solitude.
Through my anger I often find that I have released a lot of that sadness, that pain, that hurt, and anger. I cry when I’m sad but I also cry when I’m mad. It’s a double dosage for me, very overwhelming, long days and nights, and I can’t avoid the red eyes, stuffy nose, and puffy red face. But the important thing is that despite what I look like I’ve released those pent-up emotions, which means I’m one step closer to being healed.
At some point, we understand that we have to accept the reality of what has happened. We have to accept whatever it is that has broken us so that we can move on from that period of our life. For some this can take days, weeks, even months. For others, it can take a year or more. We all heal in our own way and in our own time. In order to completely heal, we can’t rush the process.
Through accepting what has happened we find the guidance we have been searching for. I like to think of this as the light at the end of the tunnel, or the silver lining. We find a way to focus our mind on things that matter to us, like our friends and family. We learn how to no longer look behind us but instead how to look forward and be opened to what’s to come. We find a way to slip back into ourselves, the selves we recognize, and get back to doing the thigs we do.
At the end of it all I believe we find solitude. We no longer let that thing that made us feel broken be the reason we don’t get out of bed. We no longer let that unpleasant feeling be the reason we don’t smile, the reason we are not happy.
I am thankful for the moments that have made me feel broken because they have guided me to a more fulfilling state of mind. A state of mind where I love myself for who I am, and live a life guided by what my heart tells me despite what the risks may be.
We have so much to appreciate about the lives we live, even if they aren’t ideal.
We aren’t meant to succeed or be happy all the time. We have to face defeat, we have to be broken in order to appreciate the strength that keeps us going, and the motivation that constantly forces us to get back up every time we fall.
The broken heal.
“If you’re broken you don’t have to stay broken.”
I’ll forever take these words with me wherever I go, and I hope you do the same.
-Xo
Kimora