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Rebuild.

This isn’t a New Year’s Resolutions post.  It’s a post about a fundamental mistake that I’ve made, and that some other people will make in the coming year.

You can’t fix yourself.  You have to rebuild.

Unless you’re supremely lucky, you’ve probably gone through something in life that broke you.  Not permanently, maybe not even visibly, but there has been one, or many experiences that have left you in a state that isn’t quite what you, or those close to you, would call pristine.  This is okay.  It’s awful, but it’s fine, because it indicates you’ve lived, rather than existing.  The risk of being broken is the price of life.

But when we’re broken, we inevitably try to ‘fix’ things.  Which leads to problems.  If something terrible happens, if your foundation is cracked, you can spend all of your time trying to patch it.  You look at the missing elements, the parts of you that are changed, or damaged, and you try to fix it.  You try to turn back into the person you were before things changed, before they got difficult.

You can’t.  And all the time you spend trying to turn yourself back into a past version of yourself will make you sadder, and colder, and farther from where you want to be.  Humans are complex systems, and the intricacies of our lives aren’t like a car - you can’t swap in seemingly identical parts and expect things to keep running.  Wanting to be fixed is a form of denial.  It’s about wanting to feel, and seem, like you’ve never been broken.

Rebuild.  Take stock of who you are, where you are, and what has changed about your life and yourself.  And then do the things that will make you happier, make you smarter and better and stronger, and do them because you want to.  No one who is trying to fix a loss, or a heartache, is going to move on - if you do this, you are defining yourself by your tragedy.

Rebuild.  It’s slower, and harder, and scarier because you never really have a clear blueprint until it’s over.  But it’s worth it.  Because you’ll be a happier, truer version of yourself on the other side.

We’re starting a new year.  Don’t make decisions that are based on trying to patch some aspect of your life, you won’t stick with them, and they won’t make you happy.  If you’re unhappy, or lost, or unsure, there’s not one thing that will suddenly make everything better again.  You don’t need to be fixed.  You need to rebuild.

dope.

Great find JayOh.