Here is the truth that, even if you walk away with nothing else from this class, you must know:
You are not broken.
Or maybe the truth is really this:
We are all broken.
Brokenness, I have come to realize, might be the most basic stroke of life. We get sick. We lose people we love. We have a vision, and life gets it twisted. A hurricane, tornado, an earthquake comes. Somebody leaves. We are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The dream doesn’t come true. Somebody needs us in a way that makes us have to pause our own wants. Life, as it does, happens.
But the reality is that our brokenness is actually the fundamental foundation to our unrelenting beauty. We are, each one of us, an exquisite piece of stained glass, the elements of our life coming together in a riot of color that inspires, informs, absolves, calms, questions, creates. And as we study that stained glass, as we try to memorize every element of what is, we cannot predict the way the light will shine through us on any given day, at any given hour. All we can know is this: we are even more brilliant and radiant because of what we have experienced and not in spite of it.
There was a time when I thought the greatest betrayal I would ever experience was the partner who didn’t fully love me; who so profoundly couldn’t stand to be alone that when he wasn’t with me, he had to find another. And, yet, what I know now is that my staying was the betrayal, my accepting less than was the loss. The pain that I felt, I came to realize, wasn’t from his neglect but my own. I had to learn to see myself in the mirror, to buy my own flowers, to think of myself in the littlest moments, to set both the literal and figurative table for myself, to feel a responsibility for meeting my own needs, to show up for myself so that I could teach others how to walk beside me, to remember that at every given moment in my life (and in the end) I will be all that I have and, given that absolute truth, I deserved to be cared for and protected by me.
You deserve this too.
And so here is what you must do: believe in your originality. Know that what makes you YOU is not what limits you but what illuminates you. Who you are, the way that you are configured, what you have experienced, and how you show up are a gift to this world. You have a purpose that is profoundly, uniquely your own and this world needs you, just as you are, for its own healing.
Our scars reveal our character. They show our strengths and not our weaknesses and the greatest gift we can give ourselves is the capacity to honor the journey that we have taken, to honor all that life has taught us, to aim each day to do good rather than be willing to do harm to ourselves. Our brokenness is nothing to be ashamed of; it is our music and our light. When we no longer feel like we must disguise or repair our cracks beyond all recognition is when our light begins to shine its brightest.
You are not broken.
You are brilliant.
Turn your light on, dear heart.
Illuminate our way.
♥
At the end of each semester, I write my students a letter that is unique to their class. This was the letter for my body image class this semester.
Want to read some past letters?
The world is aching for you to show up.
The world needs your lightness
Answer the call into your own greatness
And here is the letter I share with them on the first day of school.
