You are better for having been broken

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You are better for having been broken. You are the beauty of the imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. You, my friend, are wabi sabi, incarnate.

You are stronger for having your heart fractured by someone who didn’t love you. You learned how to fill the gaps in with liquid gold.

You are braver for having walked away, liberated by the experience of painful truth. You learned how to find others who share your quest for authenticity.

You are happier for having said your peace, even when the words came out all wrong. You learned how to set boundaries, without walling yourself off entirely.

Perfection is boring. It’s stagnant and static. Imperfection is infinite because it’s the omnipresent quest. Imperfection is about always and forever getting better. It’s the constant state of improvement, forever and ever Amen.

My prescription for living? Slow burn. Slow burn because that way, you’ll never stop, and you’ll never completely burn out. You’ll always be imperfect, but you’ll always be improving, and always getting closer and closer to perfection.

Once upon a time, the universe was perfect. Perfect only because it was nothingness. A single point, it was empty and boring and limited. Until is exploded. That gorgeous mess of particles multiplied and varied. It split and broke into an ever-growing, ever-changing infinity moving towards entropy and chaos, deterioration into the primordial state, from which it starts all over again. Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Think about it: you are a universe unto yourself. From single cells, you grew until you were ready. Born of blood and pain, you made your imperfect entrance into this life. You cried until you learned how to be understood. You fell until you learned how to walk. You stayed close until you learned how to explore on your own. You mimicked until you learned how to create in your own right. You lived in a constant state of flux, growing and learning, failing and winning. Ebbing and flowing.

You didn’t stay that chubby little baby or that precocious Kindergartner forever. And thankfully, you didn’t remain a moody teenager for more than a couple of years.

All of those stages were impermanent. Remember? Just like this moment. All things must pass away.

Your life is not measured out in photos, or in social media tableaus. You are not that time he stood you up. You are not that time she spat out poisonous words. You are not that grade in Chemistry. Or that party you weren’t invited to. Or that patronizing shade stare. You are not a series of still moments, but an ever-flowing river of past and present and future.

You are not the sum of your failures and weaknesses. You are the sum of your capacity to become better than you are right now.

Never forget that you are better for having been broken, because the cracks are how the light gets in.

→ Read the original piece in Issue No. 1 of Vahid Magazine.