A dear friend wrote that all the different pieces of her were here for me.

Well, those aren’t her exact words, but I so got what she meant. You see, I had been writing about how full of grief and sadness I am.

I have not felt whole in a long time.

Maybe when I was a child, pre-teen, there were moments of ease and comfort. Maybe not….

The beauty of her line is that we are all broken, in one way or another. Life does that to each of us and we break in our special way.

You would not meet me and think: Broken.

I teach yoga full time. I write. I have friends. I have my birth family and a wonderful husband and four cats and way too many books.

I have more to do in a day than I can ever do, because sometimes I just need the comfort of my loving neighbor, or the distraction of television or better yet, an engaging movie. Sometimes, I read.

I have more to do because there’s so much I don’t get done.

I feel broken inside. I feel like my spirit is a kaleidoscope of colors, each one a feeling or a thought, a hope or dream, a wish or a hurt.

I see a psychiatrist for medication. I don’t tell him my problems because I feel like he wants to fix me. I will tell him so at some point, or maybe he’ll read this.

I don’t believe in cures—I believe in healing.

I believe my parts all fit together just right to make me one person. Some of these parts are like those dolls we had as kids with the heads pulled off. Some take on the comfort of Winnie-the-Pooh or my bunny, Pudgy Pal. Some parts are layered in books, like Catcher on the Rye, which made perfect sense to me the first time I read it.

I could make a collage of poems I have written throughout my life, each one marking a moment and yet some of these moments I don’t remember though the poem might contain a few grains of it.

Yet, my friend knows what broken is. Many of us spend time walking around as if we are fine. We put on a good face, our game face. We smile and nod and tell the world we’re fine.

I think we’re often just saying we’re fine because our broken self needs to hear it.

We all have the same nervous system—we all have needs.

Some of us are better cooks, others better at sales…some folk thrive on competition and others could not care a less about winning or losing or being the best.

What we all want is to feel a sense of peace. We all need to feel loved for who we are; all the different pieces and the person we present to the world.

We all want respect.

Tonight, I watched a movie on the Lifetime Channel, not my first stop, but here it was. And of course, I cried. Because the woman had schizophrenia, like me, but unlike me, she was not able to live in the world. And her sister struggled with her shame of her sister, the hurts, the layered history sisters always have.

And I thought to myself: I am just as broken as the woman on television. I understand voices.

But we don’t need a mental health condition to set us apart; we all have something.

I may be broken—and I don’t want to be fixed.

I do want to find ways to heal but I find living life is the best medicine, waking up with the day, and doing my best, whatever it is.

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Ed: Bryonie Wise

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