Shattered

I broke a glass tabletop into a million pieces the other day.

I was moving it from the basement to the backyard but it never made it out. It simply just exploded in my hands, or that's how it felt anyway. It was a large piece of glass and then it turned into many smaller pieces of glass, completely unrecognizable from it's previous shape. No longer able to hold anything. I collapsed on the floor and cried. I cried because I was in trouble but I mostly cried because I related with the glass. It reminded me of this quote by Margaret Atwood, "You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone."

It was the best visualization of an emotion that I have ever seen and even though I was in trouble, and I was covered in cuts and bleeding I still had that moment of "yeah, me too." And even after it broke into a million pieces and spread itself all over the basement, it was making the most beautiful noise. It was still breaking, and rubbing against itself and it created this chorus of broken glass. It shattered, shimmered and sang.

It made me mad. I shouldn't have been so impatient, I should have been more careful but I took a risk and being human, and not having the power to predict the future I just did what I thought I should do and it literally blew up in my face.

I was having a conversation with my best friend the other day about how life is a gamble. You can never really know if you are making the right decisions or if the "good" decisions you are making now will turn into bad ones. Lost chances, regrets, mistakes...its all a risk.

It's a risk when you go into a relationship with someone. It's a risk to even call it a relationship. To look forward to seeing someone, to kiss them, to know their body, their taste, to know what it feels like to have their body pressed to yours to hear them whisper in your ear...because you never know when it will all go away. We don't have control over other people and no matter how much you want something to go the way you have imagined it, there is a good chance that it won't.

And when it doesn't, like in a relationship- we say we are heartbroken. Our idea is shattered, and so is our heart. And so is the glass.

I picked up the glass, teary eyed, and I was mad about so many things but mostly mad about the fact that things change. Things. Everything. Without warning and it becomes your job to pick up the pieces. But there are pieces that can't be found, or are too difficult to reach so they remain there forever. Maybe you like the reminder, but you know that you have to be careful now to not get cut. There are new dangers, new insecurities to tend to. So you wear shoes. Build a wall. Avoid a room, a place, a person.  You learn, and you move on. Buy a plastic replacement, something that won't break this time. Invest in something that will last forever.

But life is a gamble. It's a risk. It's scary and sad and loud and quiet and illuminating and deafening. It is what it is and nothing is guaranteed.

The cuts are already healing. There had to have been at least a dozen of them because after the sheet of glass broke I picked up the pieces with no regard to how much it hurt to hold the jagged glass in my fingers. All I saw was red, red, red. But then I washed off the blood, got a broom, wiped away the tears and cleaned it all up. And now the glass is gone. The cuts are fading and I am moving on. I will forever be moving on until something else breaks, or I find the glue to hold it all together.

"I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone."

The Good

If everything had gone as planned, as I imagined it when I first started graduate school, I would be finishing up by now. I would be handing in my portfolio and would have a plane ticket to Arizona booked to take the Child Life Certification Exam. I would be applying for jobs and hopefully going on interviews. But I'm not. I chose to stop.

I can't honestly say that I don't feel any remorse over the fact that I won't be getting my Master's in a few weeks. I have thankfully stayed in touch with everyone in my program and I envy them. They've pushed through, done their best and now they will graduate and have Masters degrees. The next chapter of their lives are beginning and I couldn't be happier for them. I'm happy to still be included in their group. I think it comes with the field. We stick close because not many people know what we have been through. The Child Life world is a small one. Almost like an island. Isolated, but still a driving force in the world. It exists even if not many people know about it. I look at these amazing women and I envy them but more than that I am grateful for them. They made my first year at grad school unforgettable and they made my last few months of grad school manageable.

I try to find the good in every situation, no matter how horrible it was. I think that there is always something to learn and you always come away with some good. They are the good. They are the gifts that I will carry with me forever. I wish them all the best.

And as the weight of grad school is slowly lifted from their shoulders I find myself not any more clear about what I want to do with my future. A new career pops into my head everyday and on same days I think I could just be a waitress forever. All I know, and all I've ever known, is that I want to help people. As a little girl I wanted to be a teacher (but mostly just to write on the chalkboards), then I wanted to start my own magazine for teens, then I wanted to be a writer (but who really knows what that means), then I switched to being a psychologist and then eventually landed on being a CLS. But now I'm back at the beginning- back to being just like that little girl who sat on her bed dreaming of what she will do when she grows up.