I am posting for the 800th time on my Hunting for Hearts Instagram feed tonight. I could have done this weeks ago, but I over-thought it like I sometimes do. I wanted to write something to go with it, but whenever I tried, I didn’t feel like my words were enough.
So, I’m using someone else’s. I recently read “Love Warrior” by Glennon Doyle and this spoke to me:
“You can be shattered and then you can put yourself back together piece by piece.
But what can happen over time is this: You wake up one day and realize that you have put yourself back together completely differently. That you are whole, finally, and strong – but you are now a different shape, a different size. This sort of change — the change that occurs when you sit inside your own pain — it’s revolutionary. When you let yourself die, there is suddenly one day: new life. You are Different. New. And no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot fit into your old life anymore. You are like a snake trying to fit into old, dead skin, or a butterfly trying to crawl back into the cocoon, or new wine trying to pour itself back into an old wineskin. This new you is equal parts undeniable and terrifying.
Because you just do not fit. And suddenly you know that. And you have become a woman who doesn’t ignore her knowing. Who doesn’t pretend she doesn’t know. Because pretending makes you sick. And because you never promised yourself an easy life, but you did promise yourself a true one. You did promise – back when you were putting yourself back together – that you’d never betray you again.”
After my dad passed away, I wrote that sometimes your heart break into 1,000 pieces. It’s something I’ve thought about many times since that December day when I broke. For me, this heart journey has been a lot of things, but perhaps the main purpose has been putting myself back together again. Maybe 800 of my heart’s pieces are intact, but they’ve been melted, and ground, and plastered together completely differently. I don’t regret the way those jagged pieces have been sorted, misplaced, and glued, sometimes haphazardly I’m sure. I am not a perfect puzzle, but I’m my own kind of masterpiece in the making and I’m going to keep being true to that person – truer than maybe I’ve ever been.