Broken Things

I genuinely love broken things. My whole life I’ve been considered in my family to be “unlucky” and its a running joke in my family that “if they make a million of it and you give her one, that’s the only one that’ll brake.”

It’s always seemed true too, when I was young and would get a new toy identical to one my sister got, I’d open it and find it already broken. I used to get upset about this, thinking about how unfair it was that nine times out of ten I’d get the broken one. Until I was about seven and I got this talking baby doll that is.

I loved my dolls,  to me they were real, so when I got home after falling in love with this doll only to find mine didn’t work I was crushed. My mom immediately kicked herself for not checking it before we’d gotten home and told me we could go back and exchange it. In my small sensitive mind I looked at it and told her I’d keep it saying, “just because it’s broken doesn’t mean it doesn’t disserve love.” In my mind somebody had to love it, it was still a good toy, it wasn’t fair to not love it because it wasn’t perfect.

Looking back at this I can’t help but shake my head, but this moment was crucial to my personality later in life. After that I held onto that mentality, soon I was purposefully buying second hand toys that no one wanted because “everyone needs someone to love them” and I could fix the broken and make them unique, stronger. I fell in love with fixing things, with putting the broken back together in new ways.

I’m an adult now, I don’t see toys how I used to obviously but this need to seek out the unlucky and broken things in the world has never gone away. In fact, this has become a large part of who I am. Intentionally or not I tend to find the people and things that are broken, and fixate on making them better but not the same as they always were.

It’s funny how a little girl who brings home the unwanted and discarded toys she finds and fixes them, makes sure that someone loves them, can grow up and see that translate into helping living things. It’s amazing to me how the belief of a child being applied to a toy can translate later on to their beliefs about people.

I still believe that everyone disserves to be loved. I still love what’s “broken” and am drawn to it. I don’t believe broken things are damaged anymore though, I think they are  the things that are the most prepared for change. A broken heart or mind may not be as easy to fix as a toy but they do have this fundamental thing in common; they have the potential to not only be mended but to be changed for the better and made stronger.

There’s nothing wrong with broken things, not when left in the hands of someone with the patience, love, and understanding to make them better. I try to be that kind of person, I try to be the girl who loves broken things, even if sometimes that thing is someone I love or even on rare occasions, myself.