Brokenness

I was trying to heal and ended up breaking my brokenness and now, I guess, I'm stuck somewhere in the middle, trying to figure out which way I go. 

It sounds like a strange statement to make, but hear me out - I don't think I'm alone in this. I think a lot of folks have this exact same experience. 

The human being is a marvelous creature with amazing adaptation skills. Most human beings, by innate survival skill, will compensate for their weaknesses, mask their vulnerabilities, and find a way to continue to function and move on with living to the best of their ability. 

It's something we talk about a lot psychologically, with "masking." Finding a way to function through depression, finding a way to fit in socially with neurodivergent behaviors, finding a way to calm anxieties. We call it "pretending" sometimes, but it's much more than that. 

It's survival. 

The thing is that when we get to a place where we're done surviving, where we're tired of pushing through our days, where we aren't sure we have the strength to keep doing life this way, or - if God should be so gracious - you have an opportunity to truly heal what you've been compensating for, there comes this point where what you've been doing simply doesn't work any more. 

What's most fun *sarcasm* about this point is that it is also a point where the new thing isn't working yet, either. It's starting to work, but it's not ready to take over full time. It's just...ready to quit the compensations. 

Because there comes a point where continuing to compensate for your brokenness keeps you from building the true strength that you need to overcome it. 

Many years ago, something broke in my life that affected my physical ability to do something that comes naturally and normally to almost every able-bodied human...and many animals. Something so small and stupid that over the course of my life as I've told others that I can't do that, they've just cocked their heads sideways at me like, "Everybody can do that." No, not everybody. 

But as human nature would have it, my body just naturally came up with its own plan, made a compensation, and that's the way I've been doing it for decades. After the first few years of trying everything I could to forge a different path for myself, I gave up on the idea that it would ever be healed, I accepted my compensation, and I moved on with life - functioning well, if not "normally." 

All of a sudden, without ever expecting such a thing, I'm in a season where actual healing might be possible. At this point, it is not just a physical healing that would be required; my compensation also needs to be healed, as well as my psychological wraparound that envelops this whole thing. Put more simply, not only does my body need to be able to do it, but my mind needs to be able to believe and to trust that my body can do it. And that's no small task. 

What's most frustrating right now, however, is that as I continue to work the physical program and discover myself doing what I haven't thought possible in a very long time, the compensation that I made for myself all those years ago doesn't feel as natural as it has become for me. It feels broken. So I can't do what I'm one day going to do, but I also can't, right now, do what I have always done. 

Here I am - stuck in a weird brokenness of brokenness and trying to figure out which way I go. 

When you just need something that works, any old brokenness is fine, so long as you've found your way through it. But when something better is possible...there's the rub. What's a girl to do? 

Go with God, of course, and embrace the moment. Take whatever healing comes and whatever brokenness may be put back together and whatever compromise or compensation comes in the in-between because it's not the blink of an eye, it's the walk of faith and nothing happens overnight. (Not unless God wills it so, but we've talked about that in this space, too.) 

The only thing you are ever responsible for in this life is the next faithful thing, whatever that may be. So I'm doing that. 

And I don't think I'm alone.