brittle.

not the brownie kind. although that’s the best kind. no, i am talking about brittle, like fragile, like handle with care, like me right now. brittle; hard but liable to break or shatter easily. like me right now. no joke, i could come undone in minutes. not in a bad way, just in the ‘life has me feeling kind of fragile right now’. it’s been one of those weeks, ya know. where everything starts to go wrong just as you thought you’d gotten through the last rough patch. where you finally have the house clean and you turn around and your hamper is overflowing. or you finally get over the cold you had to find your dog throwing up on the living room rug. that ‘one thing after another’ vibe. but here’s the thing; i am not a complainer. it’s not how i was raised, nor do i find it to be productive. my anxiety often keeps me from being proactive but i rarely complain. {my husband is probably rolling his eyes right now} but seriously, i suffer in silence a lot. mostly because i don’t want people to see just how fragile i can be when life has me in pieces.

there is an ancient japanese practice called kintsugi; the art of taking broken pottery and sealing the cracks with gold. when finished, the pottery is fixed but you can see the scars from its fall. the scars are the prettiest part; shiny and gold. its what makes the pottery more beautiful, worthy of the stares. the pottery was once fragile, and then it was once broken, and then it was repaired. beautifully. delicately. gracefully. it was always fragile; even before it shattered. but it was still beautiful after the crash.

brittle. fragile. gentle. delicate. it’s okay to be all of those things. easily broken can also mean easily fixed. and i think that’s the hard part about the world we live in; we are expected to be hard. expected to be strong. expected to be our own hurricane shutters. expected to shield our own typhoons. brace our own impacts. keep ourselves away from the ledges. it’s nearly impossible to avoid a rough patch or two. it’s hard to steer away from the the shit that comes down hard. here’s the other hard part; getting people to pick you up gently. be easy on the edges. hold you carefully. the cracks aren’t always obvious, sometimes hidden or deep set. and before y’all go and throw a red flag on my blog, assuming i have lost my mind or need a psychiatrist on line one; i am good. i am strong. i have been sealed with gold, over and over again. often i have been the artist, picking up the broken bits and filing gold between them.

brittle doesn’t mean broken. it just means ‘handle with care’. some of us are already cracked; still beautiful. still together. strong but fragile. strong but delicate. be easy on those who have cracks in small places. be easy on those who have put themselves back together. be easy on those who are sealed with gold or silver or bronze or whatever. fusing ourselves back together takes hard work; it takes patience; it takes pain. being brittle, being fragile, being delicate; simply means ‘handle with care’. because the world is hard enough; the world jostles you; the world exposes your broken seams. so be easy to those who were broken before or who are scooping up the pieces now.

life can put you into pieces. life can break you in new places. life can show your scars. life can shatter your glaze. life is for the broken. let’s all fill in the spaces with gold.

xo.