Damage

We are all damaged in some way.

Life, while beautiful and amazing in so many ways, can be hard and cruel. People hurt us – people we love and people we don’t even know. Situations and events can tear us down.

 

And cruelty and pain and being torn down all leave marks, wounds, and scars.

We are all damaged.

For some of us, the damage is simply dents and dings; for some, the wounds are jagged and open, hearts and souls hanging out in a bloody, pulpy mess; others bear scars and aches from long-past stabs and kicks to the heart; for others still, the damage is more like a cancer or a tumor, unseen, growing and poisoning from the inside.

We are all damaged.

When I married my ex-husband, I could see, very clearly, his damage. And I believed I could heal him. Because that’s what I do. I fix what’s broken. Or I try to. And when I fail, I take on all the responsibility for, not only the failure, but for the other person’s brokenness, too. Somehow, because I cannot fix it, I become the keeper of the pain, even when it’s not mine to take.

We are all damaged.

What I have come to realize is that a person has to believe that they need healing in order to heal. That was a hard lesson learned, over 16 years with a man who believed he was whole and the rest of the world was broken; a lesson learned by holding on tightly to someone whose shattering could not be glued back together -- whose jagged edges cut me to the bone and left me wounded and reeling.

And I have learned that even when we can clearly see our own damage and feel our own pain and understand that we need healing, it is incredibly difficult to heal ourselves.

 

But sometimes we encounter someone who makes us believe that healing is possible.

 

 

~ A person whose damage is so much like our own…

~ A person who struggles in the same ways… whose damage has manifested in mirror images to our own… whose personality has been shaped in disconcertingly similar (and sometimes identical) ways to our own…

~ A person who needs and wants to heal, too…

I recently met such a person…

 

~ A person who, maybe for the first time ever, has made me really and truly understand that fixing someone else is not my responsibility, no matter how strong the desire... but what I can do is allow another person to draw from my strength without weakening myself…

~ A person who has made me realize, maybe for the first time ever, that I do not need to define and label a relationship or know exactly what it’s going to eventually be; that it really is OK to simply give up that control and allow myself to simply be present – to love and accept without expectation, on a level that is deep at the heart of a friendship that feels… boundless…

~ A person who has made me see that in accepting and loving a person whose damage and flaws and failings – and positive qualities as well – are so very much like my own, I am actually giving myself permission to accept and love myself.

And that?

Is huge.

It might just allow me to fix what’s broken in me.

And I’m not sure I have ever truly believed that possible.

We are all damaged.

But there is a path to healing…

 

We simply have to be ready to see it…