Maybe the problem's in the spackle.

The world will break your heart sometimes; you’ll be frustrated that no one in the world seems to care like you do. And when you figure this out, it’s okay to let yourself feel hurt. It’s okay to take a break from feeling like everything has to be perfect all the time. The truth is that we’re all a little bit broken. Some people are just better at hiding the cracks.

- Journal entry, November 2010

I've spent a lot of years wishing that I could hide my cracks. I've wished that I could fix them up with the spackle of “I've got it all together” or “I don’t need anybody but myself.” After all, it’s a lot easier to function in the world without your brokenness on display for everyone to see.

But that’s not who I am.

Time has an interesting way of revealing who we are to other people, and, more importantly, to ourselves. When I can’t sleep at night (which is most of the time – hello insomnia!), I end up lying in a darkened room, staring at the ceiling. For the first hour or so, my mind goes in a thousand different directions, each of which typically leads to me replaying every decision I've ever made. Eventually though, my mind drifts back, like a buoy bobbing just above the water line. In the last 30 minutes before I fall asleep, my eyes follow the cracks in the ceiling. Though the room is dark, the glow of outdoor lights illuminates one spot. It’s a small area in one corner, about the size of a half-dollar. Though the spot was patched, it is slightly discolored and uneven. The water must have crept in during the last big storm.  My eyes follow the cracks, each one forming a jagged path that almost, but not quite, blends in with the stucco. Looking at them, I am reminded of this truth: the rain highlights the cracks in everything.

Just as we’re all a little bit broken, we’re all doing our best to hide our cracks. Self-deprecating humor, feigned apathy, ruthless perfectionism – they’re all spackle that we use to try and cover up the broken places inside of us. Depending on how long we've spent applying that protective coating (for most of us, probably the majority of our lives), it can do a pretty good job of masking things. But when the rain comes – times of suffering, echoes of self-doubt, pangs of loneliness –  it has a way of stripping us down. Just like that old ceiling, the rain makes us vulnerable. It illuminates our cracks.

After more than a decade of trying to hide my cracks, I’m beginning to realize that maybe they aren't the problem. We’re all broken after all, and to quote the great Leonard Cohen, “There’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”  When we realize that we don’t have it all together, when our foundations are shaken, we begin to take notice of things we never took the time to see before. Our blessings become silk strings we grab onto for dear life; the little things we took for granted become the big things. And while our cracks help us to soak in the everyday light of being alive and in this world, they also enable us to let our light out. When we acknowledge our struggle – maybe we love too deeply, jump too quickly, trust too easily  – the same light that highlights our cracks illuminates the way for other people.  I learn to see myself as a cracked, imperfect, complicated, beautiful wonder and you learn to see yourself as a cracked, imperfect, complicated, beautiful wonder, and we look at each other and say, “Seriously, you too? I thought I was the only one.”  I think that’s what the bond of humanity is, in a nutshell. 

Without the cracks, we wouldn't have any of that. No humanity-sharing, no wonder-finding. So maybe the problem isn't in the cracks. Maybe the problem's in the spackle.