What If Nobody Is Broken?

Here’s a thought to chew on: what if – in spite of all the ways you might struggle with being a human in the world – you aren’t broken? What if the people that hurt us aren’t broken? What if nobody is broken? What would that mean? Who would we be? How would letting go of that story change the way we’re able to show up for ourselves and with each other?

I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling broken. When shit has come up in my relationships, in my work, in my day-to-day life, and I’ve felt unable to cope with it – I’ve felt broken. When I reacted in ways that caused harm to myself (especially) or others (less frequently), I would then make things worse by beating myself up with the story that I was fucked up and broken. 

And if you can relate, I hope this post helps you feel less alone. If you can’t relate, well, maybe reading this will help you understand what it’s like for those of us wrestling with childhood trauma or depression or anxiety or addiction or CPTSD or any of the other myriad ways that life makes things hard to cope with.

It’s taken a lot of years of therapy to let go of the idea of brokenness, to stop thinking of myself as a project that needs to be “fixed,” to give myself a fucking break. And I think I’m about 94.7% there. Which is pretty fucking miraculous given where I started.

Growing Up the “Fat” Kid

I was overweight as a kid. (And, technically, by the idiotic BMI standards, I’m overweight now – in spite of being a long distance runner and feeling fucking great in my body. Cool, cool, cool, bullshit health messaging. Thanks for that.) So, I got the message, starting at a very young age, that because I had a body that didn’t fit the social standards for “healthy” weight there was something deeply wrong with me. Being a “fat” kid meant that I was repulsive to others, that I didn’t have value in the world, that I was unlovable. And y’all, that really fucked me up.

Consequently, even after I lost weight and my body looked more like it was “supposed” to, I hit adulthood and deeply struggled with insecurity and intimacy and trust and relating to others. I used weed and alcohol to help me feel okay in my body and around people. And just being a human in the world felt SO HARD, so much of the time. 

I thought I was broken. 

And the story that I was somehow broken, that there was something deeply wrong with me that would probably never be “fixed,” kept me isolated and filled with self loathing for years and years and years.

I wouldn’t recommend it. 

But here’s the thing. What if, even though I was bullied as a kid and struggled with profound insecurity and social anxiety and a ruthless inner critic, that didn’t mean anything was wrong with me? What if instead of being broken, I just never got the opportunity to learn better skills?

We’re All Just Learning

When a kid is learning something for the first time, whether it’s piano or how to read or even how to walk, we don’t look at them struggling with it and say, “what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just walk already?! Stupid baby.” (I mean, I really fucking hope you don’t say that to a kid. I can’t imagine how you found your way to this blog if that’s how you roll).

We don’t berate children for not knowing how to do things yet. So why in fucking hell do we do that to ourselves? Why do we get mad at ourselves for not knowing how to handle intimacy or receive love? For not knowing how to just “have” self confidence? For not knowing how to set boundaries? Not knowing how to self soothe? Not making it to adulthood knowing how to just be totally zen and chill and secure in our attachment styles?

Those are rhetorical questions. Society is why. Pop culture is why. Our family systems are why. Capitalism is why (because it thrives on making us feel less than so we can buy some shit to try and fill the void of not enough – but that’s a rant for someone else’s blog).

We Just Had Shitty Lessons

What if instead of being broken, we just had shitty teachers? We just learned shitty lessons? We just didn’t get the opportunity to thrive and so did the best we could with what we had?

I’m not saying that my trauma wasn’t fucked up and shouldn’t have happened. It’s not like it doesn’t make my life difficult or that there aren’t a whole host of better ways to cope. I’m not saying that all the shitty things that happened to me didn’t have profoundly negative and challenging consequences for me and my emotional, mental, and spiritual development. I’m not saying that any of that wasn’t shitty, and awful, and I deserved better.

But I am saying that it might be helpful to look at it a bit differently. Rather than looking at those things and thinking they left me broken or fucked up or a bad person, I can choose to tell myself that those things just taught me really ineffective or inefficient ways of coping with life. And that I can learn better ways.

We Learned Inefficient Coping Strategies

All of this makes me think about swimming. 

If I jump into a pool, I can absolutely keep myself from drowning. I can even do things more sophisticated than a doggie paddle. I can spend a concerted amount of time in the water without stress, or fear, or overtaxing myself. So, by the standard of swimming as an important life skill that will keep me from dying if I fall into a body of water? I’m a great swimmer. 

But by the standards of how you’re “supposed” to swim? My breast stroke is fucking laughable, as are any of my other flailing attempts to mimic “real” swimmers. 

Now, I could go take some swim lessons as an adult. It might be a little embarrassing for me – since adults are “supposed” to know how to swim well, right? But I could do that. And maybe I could even do that without being a dick to myself about it, since it turns out that YouTube is not good for teaching you how to swim. You have to learn by doing, and it helps to have someone who knows what they’re doing there to guide you along, to correct your technique and help you improve.

And I think that’s maybe a helpful analogy for dealing with life in ways that “mature” or “healthy” or “self-aware” or “emotionally intelligent” adults are supposed to. While I learned how to exist in the world without causing complete havoc (i.e. not drowning), I did not pick up the skills for feeling happy, healthy, and whole (i.e. swimming well).

In theory, parents are supposed to teach us the skills we need to thrive – in basically all areas of our lives. Which, now that I’ve had friends and lovers who are parents, seems like a completely unrealistic, incredibly tall order to take on! There is SO much that goes into being a functioning adult in the world – laundry, finances, flossing! Plus all the emotionally challenging shit like handling conflict appropriately, practicing self awareness, and cultivating intimacy in healthy ways. It’s totally unreasonable to expect one person or even two people to be able to teach us all of those things. Especially if they don’t have the skills themselves. 

Boundaries are hard. Self-esteem is hard. Emotional intelligence is hard. Loving unconditionally is hard. Being self-aware and present and patient and kind… all of it is hard. And if our parents didn’t have models for that stuff, how could they possibly teach it to us in turn?

So, setting aside egregious abuse and neglect, our parents probably did the best they could. They also probably failed us in a lot of ways. But maybe not all of them. And they did manage to teach us how to keep from metaphorically drowning – since we’re still here. 

But they also probably taught us a lot of inefficient techniques for dealing with shit – like yelling, or passive aggression, or the silent treatment, or hyper vigilance, or perfectionism, or over-eating, or being hyper-critical or judgemental or harsh… And that sucks. But it’s also – to me – a much more helpful perspective to believe I just learned the wrong lessons than to constantly tell myself I’m broken. 

We Can Learn Better Strategies – It’s Just Hard

Being a bad swimmer doesn’t mean I’m broken. It just means I haven’t put the time and effort and attention into learning to swim.

Having low self-esteem doesn’t mean you’re broken. Struggling with boundaries doesn’t mean you’re broken. People pleasing, avoidance, insecurity, lashing out, shutting down, weeping at the drop of a dime… none of that means you’re broken. It just means you never learned a better way. 

And learning is so hard. Unlearning is even harder! If you’ve been reaching for a particular coping mechanism for decades, it’s going to be really challenging to untrain those muscles. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and it doesn’t mean you’re broken.

I think a lot of us fall into the trap that just because we see something or realize it, we should be able to change it. This comes up a lot when folks are getting sober – we see that something is a problem and then don’t understand why it continues to be a problem. But, really, that’s not how change works, especially not in the brain. 

It takes time and effort to learn new things – which is SO annoying to instant gratification junkies. And when it comes to interpersonal skills (which absolutely includes our relationship to ourselves), it’s especially hard to unlearn the ruts we’ve worn in our brains. 

If you’ve been berating yourself for decades, it’s not just going to stop happening the moment you realize that’s what’s been going on. It’ll take time and conscious effort – and probably a lot of frustration along the way.

But you can learn. A growth mindset is vital. You have to start believing you can improve. And there are so many resources to help. I just think it’s important to stop thinking we can do it on our own. 

Find the Right People To Practice With

For interpersonal shit like boundaries and social anxiety and intimacy, we need to practice with other people. So, we need to find people who are safe to practice with – whether that starts with a therapist or recovery group or one or two close friends. If we surround ourselves with people who are committed to doing and being and showing up better in the world, we’ll have better models. 

There’s a saying that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with, and I deeply believe that to be true. So if I want to be a better version of myself, if I want to learn better coping strategies, then I want to surround myself with people who are also committed to that goal. And if I don’t want to believe that I’m broken or need fixing, then I need the people around me to stop believing that, too (or themselves or of me). 

This is an emerging theme in my posts – we can’t do any of this alone. And letting go of loneliness starts with learning to be vulnerable and let people in. (But I think we’ve hit the point of that being another post – this shit got long!)