The Brave & Brokenhearted Club: Are You In?
I want to start a new club. Who wants to join? Everyone? Great!!!!!
It’s called The Brave and Brokenhearted Club. Think you belong in it?
Here are the qualifications for admission:
A) You are human.
B) You’ve had your heart broken.
C) You are still living and breathing and walking around on a planet with your broken heart, knowing it could be smashed into pieces again anytime. You are still daring to be in relationship with other human beings who may get sick, or struggle, or die, or hurt you or betray you…and you are still loving them, anyway. Because, you can.
This is not a sad club. It’s a club of elite members of people – humans – who do really brave things like open their hearts up again and again, even after they’ve been broken or trampled or pummeled or pounced on. People who have become masters at stitching their hearts back together from pieces and pumping those hearts even louder and prouder for what they’ve loved and what they’ve lost. People who live wholeheartedly, as Brene Brown calls it, embracing love for as long as they can hold it, knowing, in their hands lies the both the possibility for their greatest joy and profoundest sorrow. Because to love is the highest risk – it is risking our own hearts. It is knowing we can never hold onto something, truly – that every love, relationship, friend, teacher, experience, is only ours to borrow for a time.
It’s living out loud, even with broken hearts. It’s letting those broken hearts grow, not wither, from each loss, each beating. It’s owning our stories and showing them to others, so we can ALL BE REAL about the truth of our humanity.
It’s still loving hard, playing hard, giving hard, believing hard, faith-ing hard, praying hard…while also grieving hard, crying hard, raging hard, recovering hard, and growing…HARD…no matter what life gives us.
But, even more than all this, let me tell you what this club is really about.
This is a club for front runners. For brave and brokenhearted souls who are willing to walk ahead of the pack, alone, standing for their truth.
You see, it’s very cold and lonely walking this road alone, sometimes, but we are the people who have finally figured out, after years of trial and error, that there is no MAGIC PILL. That healing NEVER comes overnight. That part of life is taking time to honor, acknowledge, process and recover from the stories that make us and break us.
In this modern day and age, our society has found a way to hit fast forward on just about everything. We’ve sped up cooking, eating, exercising, traveling, working…but, we’re paying the price in so many ways for speeding up BEINGNESS. Where is the time to just BE? And where is the time to grieve, feel, emote, joy, sorrow; celebrate?
Our bodies were not designed to heal overnight. When you get a cut, or scrape, wound or broken leg, do you expect that you’ll wake up the next morning healed?
The Brave and Brokenhearted know that hearts heal like bodies. They take time to puss, bleed, ooze, scab and scar, too. They take time to put back together after they’ve been shattered, like carefully rebuilding a broken ceramic vase from three million tiny shards and pieces.
We Brave and Brokenhearted, we believe it’s ok to take this time. We’ve stopped listening to the society that tells us to, “Hurry up and get over it!” “Put on a brave face!” “Soldier on!” And, “Keep positive!”
We Brave and Brokenhearted give ourselves and others permission to feel, to grieve, to struggle, to celebrate the tiny victories and the large ones. We give ourselves and others permission to take time to heal. To be whoever we are. To own our stories, our diagnosis’, our never-ending grief, our mistakes, our growth and recovery.
We have taken TIME back, and given it to ourselves.
And we want you to have it, too. Time to not only mend your heart, but breathe it back to life and joy and loving again. Time to not have all the answers or solutions just yet. Time to recover not just from illness but from trauma and loss and grief. Time to fill your well, every single day. Time to pursue your passions and purpose on this Earth. Time to mine the dark caverns of your soul for gold, and time to bring that gold to the surface, to share with others, because we need what you have!!!!
It takes courage to join this club. It means standing against the old paradigm of HURRY UP AND GET OVER IT, and holding a vision of a new era, a new paradigm while others who don’t understand (yet) look on with bewilderment, or worse, look away. But, we have to do this anyway, for each other, so that every time one of us starts to feel lonely up there ahead of the pack, we remember, we are NOT alone.
There are more and more of us coming out of the shadows every day, saying, “I’m not hiding who I am anymore. I’m human. I struggle. I fall down. I get back up. I throw pity parties and tantrums. I make mistakes. I eat too much chocolate. I cry, I scream. But, I’m alive. I’m still breathing. I’m still trying. And that’s what makes me amazing.”
There’s a funny thing that happens when we give ourselves permission to be exactly who we are. We give others that permission, too. They get permission to take off their masks, let down their hair, and pull up a chair to THE REAL AND RAW table, too. And you know what that feels like?
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh….relief.
So, we just have to keep showing up and keeping it real and being honest about whatever is in our hearts, and soon enough, those people staring at us in bewilderment, will be pulling up chairs to our table and saying, “Thank you, thank you for inviting me to the Brave and Brokenhearted club, where I have permission to be…HUMAN, too. Thank you.”
Are you in?
#brave&brokenheartedclub
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