Jackie Walker

Most people when they hear that someone’s fallen to pieces are full of pity.  Some folks don’t want pity.  They want understanding that it’s sore, that it’s maybe not so good, and yet they sure as hell don’t want pity.

So often it’s the fear of being looked upon as a sad case that people bottle up their hurts or fears.

What was old Humpty doing on the wall in the first place – he doesn’t have a flat base and anyone with half a brain could tell that he’d fall off with the vibration of the horses riding past.  Maybe he just wanted to live a bit out on the edge and see more than his safe existence normally afforded him.

Have you ever done that?  I have … usually with similar results to Humpty.  I’ve smashed my face, taken out ligaments in my knee, squished vertebrae in my back,  ended up bikini-less in a waterpark and split my head open.

There’s adventure and there’s caution.  A mix of the two is usually quite useful!

Not recognising that I was putting myself in danger due to lack of training, lack of safety equipment and too much of a gung-ho attitude led me into potentially disastrous situations.  Patently however I have guardian angels who look over me and have decided that I wasn’t ready to go yet.  Please however do not try these things just to test my theory.

Emotional hurt isn’t so different – the only thing is that the wound can’t be seen – either by you or an observer.  A broken heart may appear to have healed but in fact is encased within a steel shell.  It’s the accepted way of coping with emotional melt down.  Talking about it to friends can get you sympathy up to a point, then they get tired of it.

Not knowing how to show your vulnerability and broken bits for fear of ridicule, shame and pity means that so often it’s packed up and the muscle doesn’t get the required physiotherapy for strengthening it back to full working order.

This can change when you have the chance to get rid of the story.  It’s not what happened then which is the issue, it’s what you are afraid of now in case it happens again.  If it were Humpty, he might acknowledge that he was bored and frustrated by his eggsistence.

For a broken heart, it might mean tuning into the reason you put yourself into the situation in the first place – that’s what you need to find out, not the consequences.