Cracks
In the spring of 2022, just as it was starting to warm up and the quickening had begun, we went to the beach. My jonquils were pushing through the dirt and seeds were in the greenhouse. Weed barrier was laid in the back bed and the time was about to change. Venus, or Vingelot in another tale, shone above the mountaintops to greet the dawn. Rain barrels were full and mud season was waning quickly. We left it all and went to the beach.
By “we” I mean 12 twenty-somethings, my long-time friend and teammate, and myself. We rented SUVs that should come with a CDL requirement and we drove to the beach. And while we were there, we talked about cracks.
Cracks in the pavement evidence shifting earth. Cracks in the wall reveal the weakness of its foundation. Cracks in your skin are signs of dryness or dehydration. Cracks in your phone mean you were careless or your screen protector needs replacing. Cracks in the window, well the kids have been playing again. Cracks in your back realign your bones and muscles and get you ready for the next thing. Cracks in your soul? That’s what we came to the beach to talk about.
My teammate used the word “fracture” to describe what’s going on inside us all. It’s a good word and an apt description because fractures can take so many forms: rock hitting your windshield and the glass spider webbing like so many universes and timelines reaching out to an uncertain end, the sidewalk slowly giving way to the pull of the earth and soil and tectonic plates straining and stretching and striving not to be tamed by asphalt, the leather in your boots crumbling, falling, and weathering away from lack of care and treatment and overuse in the long, cold, wet winter. Sometimes the cracks are so small, you can’t even see them.
When I was sixteen, I played soccer on my high school team. As I reflect upon those years, I’m surprised at how much of my personality was latent in the ways I played. I was a defender; I didn’t score points all that often. My skills were in breaking things apart and setting others up for success. I was at the end of the line- you came to me when things got bad because you knew I could handle it. One day, it was probably mid-September and still HOT in southeast Tennessee, we had a game against Sweetwater High. Their colors were blue and gold to our blue and white and one of the girls in blue and gold came stripping down the sideline like she was something. But, she made the classic blunder of the overconfident forward and dribbled the ball just a little too far in front of her feet. I took a look upfield and signaled to the midfielder, then reared back and made the play with one kick. I cleared the ball to my teammate, but as I finished my kick, almost as if in revenge for foiling her foolishness, overconfident-blue-and-gold-girl performed a desperate (and illegal, I might add) slide tackle with her cleats up and out. The top of my right foot smashed into her cleats and I fell to the ground. My foot was fractured, but I didn’t know it.
Of course, I went to the hospital, but they said I had a “severe contusion” (translation: really bad bruise) and that I would be fine if I stayed off my foot for a week or so. Well, I did. And I played the rest of the season. And now I can predict the weather because the second metatarsal on my right foot hurts before it snows.
My point is: fractures are everywhere, even when you can’t see them. They’re all different, they’re all painful, and they’re all caused by different forces with the same effect: destabilizing and weakening the thing they’ve fractured. Whether you know it or not, your soul, your very identity and deepest self, has been fractured by forces outside of your control.
Think about it. How many of you were victims of emotional, verbal, or sexual abuse? I hope that someone has told you that it wasn’t your fault. If no one has: It’s not your fault. It’s out of your control. What about your culture and family of origin? Did you have any say in that, at least, from a young age? What about the political situation in your town or nation- do you have lots of control over that? Can you control the biases of others that might lead them to subjugate or overlook you? Can you control the weather, wars, or natural disasters?
No. You can’t.
Not only can you not control any of the things listed above, but you weren’t meant to. You weren’t made to carry the weight of the world and be responsible for your entire identity. If you don’t believe me, consider how much anxiety you experience on a daily basis. Ask yourself: are you anxious because you think it’s all up to you?
It’s not all up to you. It can’t be because there’s things that you can’t control. Like cracks, fractures, and the world you were born into.
You were born at a specific hour, on a specific day, in a specific month, in a specific year, in a certain decade, in a century, in a millennium, in an epoch of history. You didn’t decide to be born, you just were. You didn’t dictate any of the circumstances surrounding your birth, they just happened. You didn’t even have any say in who your parents were and how their lives, genetics, and medical history would impact your experience of being human.
No matter what you believe about the origin or purpose of life, there’s just not a lot that you have control over. The cracks, the fractures, you can’t control them and they wield tremendous influence over your life.
Depending on these circumstances that you just can’t control, you’re going to function a certain way. If you were abused, you might live your life out of fear or out of a set of assumptions about people that isn’t always accurate. You might be depressed or anxious. Maybe you’ll stuff all of your emotions and become an overachiever so that you can outrun your past and never have to think about the bad things that have happened to you. If you come from a family of addicts, it’s equally likely that you’ll follow in their foot-steps or do everything you can to escape the baggage of your last name. If you’ve got a physical or mental disability or limitation, you might try to break the glass ceiling of what people say you can achieve. Or, maybe, you’ll wallow in self-pity and never really live.
I hope you see that none of these outcomes are good. Some are socially acceptable and are even praised in the public sphere, but they’re all just bandaids and distractions from the real problem: the cracks.
In the summer of 2018, my husband and I bought our home. We got a great deal on it because it wasn’t on the nice side of town and it has lots of problems, which we planned on fixing over time. We named our home “The Burrow” as a nod to Ron Weasley’s house in The Chamber of Secrets that “looked as though it was held up by magic (which, Harry reminded himself, it probably was)”. How prophetic our naming was, time will tell. So far, though, we’ve fixed a wall that should have fallen down, replaced a tub that had a crack patched with plaster, replaced the floor in the bathroom because none of the tiles were glued down, sealed the crawl space where there was a ton of trash, water, and a disconnected furnace, replaced the roof, fixed holes in the side of the house, replaced the rickety back porch, covered pipes going to nowhere on the roof, replaced all the windows and entry doors, paid for a new heat pump, replaced most of the appliances, redone one bedroom, and installed a drainage system to correct the swamp problem in the backyard. And we’ve only lived in the house for four and a half years! Now, why do you think the house had all these problems? If you’re a contractor, homeowner, or normal person with common sense you’ll know the answer: lack of care. Most of the problems in my house were caused by lazy, shoddy workmanship. The leasing company that owned the house before we did barely fixed anything and what they did fix was poorly or haphazardly done. They didn’t fix the cracks, they fixed (or didn’t, in many cases) the symptoms caused by the cracks.
You may not own a janky home, but you know what I’m talking about: taking painkillers instead of going to see the doctor about your chronic joint pain. Doping yourself up on cold medicine and still going to class or work instead of staying home and resting. Distracting yourself with television and social media instead of going to therapy and dealing with your problems. Patching the sidewalk instead of investigating the shifting earth underneath it (and, horror of horrors, maybe not even making a sidewalk in the first place!).
We deal with the symptoms. We don’t fix the cracks.
Because fixing the cracks is hard. It’s slow. It’s boring. It’s risky. It requires work. And it requires us to admit that while some of the cracks in our life are out of our control, some of them were caused by our own foolishness.
In my list of things that needed to be fixed in my house, I mentioned a swamp problem in the backyard. The first time it rained in our new house, we knew we had an issue. Water just puddled up in the backyard and it would stay wet for days and days, even in the hot summer sun. So, we called a contractor and they came up with a solution. In order to get the water draining away from our house correctly, we had to have a bunch of drains installed all around the outside of the house and right through the back yard. If you’re going to put in drains, you’re going to have to dig some ditches. And remove some of your fence, in my case. The project wasn’t supposed to take long and didn’t sound too bad to me until it was all finished. You see, when I thought about the drains and their benefits, the picture in my mind was about six months after the project was completed. When the construction equipment rolled away and my fence was re-installed, we were left with a very muddy and very messy backyard. I didn’t realize or consider that doing the necessary work of putting in the drainage system would make such a mess or rob me of something I loved more than I was willing to admit: green outside my kitchen window.
Fixing the swamp in my backyard was hard, but necessary work. It was messy, but it had to be done if we didn’t want our house to fall down. It was painful for me emotionally and I didn’t even have to do the physical labor. And this is just my backyard!
When I talk about the cracks in our lives and how we just medicate or distract ourselves from them, I know how painful the process of tending to the fractures can be. While fixing the swamp in my backyard was painful, it wasn’t nearly as painful as dealing with the ramifications of my childhood or digging into why I struggled for years to set good boundaries.
Over the next few months (or longer, we’ll see where it goes), I want to explore the cracks in my own soul and our collective soul. I want to share some of my story so that you can see how the cracks in my life have been healed or neglected. And, in the process, I want to invite you to examine your own cracks- have the courage to assess yourself and be honest about who you are.
I hope that you leave our time together encouraged and, if I’m being really honest, healed, whole, and more of who you were made to be. I’m proud of you and I’m so glad that you’re here.