Broken Pieces

Trash or Treasure?

In the midst of our crippling “virus time,” I got the bright idea of repackaging the boxes of pottery I had stored under my bed. Unfortunately, I had a fever of 102 at the time and was in no shape to manage any of it. Three large boxes fell smack on the unforgiving bathroom floor. Not a single piece was spared. I sat on the cold tile, inventorying my losses, sobbing my eyes out and mourning each one.

My sister helped me back into bed and swept the pieces into a tall pile. She didn’t dare throw them away. They stayed there like that for a week, while I ached over their loss. Yes, they were second and third-string pieces.

But even with their imperfections, I knew that I hadn’t made them, they had made me.

There were bits of cobalt blue and dark greens from the series of angry oceans I’d done, as I tried to see how high I could force the waves. There were the shiny reds, muted oranges and sunlight yellows in abstract circles and triangles from the “Me Too” sculptures, and the perfect white abstract Madonna prototypes I had done as a gift for my mother.

They were all lost.

And, having had to stop pottery because it interfered relentlessly with my ability to draw breath, I had lost a precious addition to an arsenal that had protected me in my own brokenness.

The advent of my thirties, brought with it, the first of four vicious depressions.

Depressions that wiped the floor with my cocky, strong, life-loving self. Depressions that unraveled the threads that tethered me to life, and most threateningly to my daughter, whom I adored. Depressions that kept me behind locked doors of psychiatric units, anesthetized while electric current coursed through my brain and restored me to health and life.

With each recovery, I gained not only gratitude for my life, but a corresponding sense of my own fragility. That sturdy, ambitious, resilient woman was as much a part of my past as my childhood.

Ironically, I was blessed with companions that helped me along the way. In my first depression, words began to push their way out. I wrote these remnants of my experience on the backs of store receipts, on napkins, on my hand.

Finally, I bought the smallest notebook I could find and began to write my despair in full sentences. I didn’t know it then, but some of it was darkly funny.

Those words were my breadcrumbs. They tracked where I had been, and offered a way home. They also decided to stay. I wrote a “real” book about my experience and added a new name to myself — writer.

With each episode, I unknowingly added some new part of me that balanced out the flawed brokenness that had grown in me over time.

The vestiges of my latest love affair were now broken too. As I went to sweep them up and shovel them into the trash, pieces fell on the stark, white floor. I stared at them as they spilled out.

I began to play with them, to arrange them. There were new shapes and vibrant colors. They spoke to me in a strong voice as I transferred them to backgrounds. I fell in love again,. They adorned the place of my quarantine, and I delighted in their transformation.

I embraced my new mosaics, not as a sign of “making the best of it,” but as the very best of it. They weren’t broken pieces. They were whole, in a random, vibrant, uneven way.

They may have crashed on the floor, but they were still intact, open to regeneration, with a depth and richness that made them more than they’d been before.

And as much as I have been cursed with crashing sorrow, once again I knew with equal conviction, “This is joy.”

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