Living Broken
“Living Broken” is the name of the art because it best describes what my life feels like.
I am living. I am indeed living.
I am living a full life, an active life, a meaningful life, and a busy life.
But a piece of me is broken.
My brain is broken.
My brain is wired in a way that doesn’t work as well as it should.
My brain doesn’t do simple and normal brain business in a way that’s helpful or necessary to maintain the basic activities of living. So I spend every day making adjustments to accommodate and manage the messages my brain delivers.
To me, that’s a broken system.
I know other people living with struggle don’t describe themselves as broken. And that’s okay.
Everyone living with anything creates language that best describes their situation. Everyone has semantics they are inspired by and everyone has semantics they hate.
The word “broken” helps me to think of my condition as just another condition that needs some attention, management, or fixing.
The word broken helps me to remember that my condition is just a small part of my life, and nowhere close to the entirety of the really cool person I am. Or could be.
Broken, to me, just means that I, as a person, am living life with the distraction of a broken part.
It’s like a beautiful, wonderful home with a basement that gets flooded when it rains no matter how hard you try to keep it from flooding.
