Beauty in the Breakdown

For those of you going through difficult times, I hope this sheds new light on what it means to break down, and how to reflect on the times during which we feel at our worst and our most vulnerable....

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to “break down” or even just to “break”. The word in our language has such negative connotation. People break down, broken bones, items break, even the term break up really means that a heart is breaking. Why is it that in our oddly contrived world of emotions, words, and their interrelationships that we place such negative attachments to a beautiful word? 

When we look and reflect on the world that exists outside of our messy brains, breaking is not such a bad thing. Breaking doesn’t always mean losing function; it can mean changing function, changing form; often times, into something beautiful, fantastic, more-so than it was before. 

Glass for example, shatters when it hits the ground; breaks into hundreds if not thousands of pieces. Have you ever stopped and stared for a moment at those shards of glass? They really are spectacular in their chemistry, their structure, their ability to reflect light on so many surfaces ONLY occurs when it is “broken”.  So is the glass really broken, or has it just changed form, changed shape?

I think about this with emotional breakdowns. When they happen, I feel completely shattered, broken, but in this MONSTROUSLY ugly, hideous, embarrassing, shameful, way that is so unlike me. It’s almost an out of body experience for me, just to cry. I look at myself and say “this isn’t you…you don’t break”. It looks ugly, out of place, and just wrong. So I began to contemplate this.

I think passion is an amazing and beautiful thing, and I am such a passionate person about so many things: my dogs, my horses, my education, science, medicine, and my friends, all of whom I would literally take a bullet for. I am fiercely loyal in all relationships, both friendships and romantic ones. What is so different about these types of passion, and the pain I feel when I breakdown? Is that just not passion in a different form? 

I am really going to try viewing these moments where I feel least like myself, where I feel at my ugliest and most undesirable, and see if I can view it is an expression of passion, which even in a type of emotional breakdown, can by my new definition, never be bad. I need to view these “breakdowns” as ways to build back up. Use the passion, anger, sadness, whatever it is I’m feeling, and better myself. Change form. Become more beautiful. 

There’s a song called “Let Go” by Frou Frou that is amazing.

“So let go, jump in, oh well, what are you waiting for? It’s all right, cause there’s beauty in the breakdown. Just get in, it’s so amazing here, there’s beauty in the breakdown. It gains the more it gives, and then it rises with the fall. So hand me that remote, can’t you see that all that stuff’s a sideshow? Such boundless pleasure we’ve no time for later, now you can’t await your own arrival, you’ve 20 seconds to comply. So let go, jump in, what are you waiting for? It’s all right, cause there’s beauty in the breakdown” 

It is important to remind myself, and you to remind YOURSELF, to stop saying “I’m breaking down”, but rather to use emotions in a constructive way to heal.