“Everybody needs a place. It shouldn’t be inside someone else.”
—Richard Siken
There comes a time in most of our lives when we have to rebuild ourselves.
Regaining stability and finding secure footing after our foundations have been torn apart, flooded and ruined isn’t an easy process. We spend all our lives patching and building new platforms on top of the old broken ones, but sooner or later everything comes crashing down like a house of cards and we find ourselves half-buried in the rubble. Once free and on the path to healing and recovery we start sifting through the debris for salvageable pieces of us and our lives, realizing that there is no easy fix this time around.
We need to start over.
So we clear the rubble down to the still intact lower levels and try to use only the strongest stones for our new foundations. There might be a place for the smaller, more fragile pieces we have gathered later on, but putting them in now will only undermine everything. Build too fast, use the wrong pieces, or try to patch things together by including the pieces of someone else and it will all just break apart again. Sooner or later.
I’ve been trying to rebuild for a couple of years now.
However, I’ve been so blinded by the task at hand that I’ve used all the wrong materials and ignored the blueprints, only to tear the walls down again when they won’t hold up. And lately I have kept myself so busy with other things that I’ve almost entirely neglected the most important project – myself.
But I’m getting there.
The world around us has a tendency to supply most of the things we need (if not all) if we only keep our eyes and minds open to it and are willing to put in the work. These past few days I’ve come across people, writings and resources which not only inspire me to get back on track, but come with the added bonus of new ideas on how to build myself up.
All too often we incorporate other people and other people’s wishes into the foundations of the life we build for ourselves, instead of first making a strong and durable foundation in the person we are, on our own.