Discovering Resilience in our Brokenness: Broken is beautiful
“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story” – Boris Cyrulnik.
I lost my dad in my formative years. I have seen my mother bring me up single handedly standing tall like an enormous block of solid rock. I am sure she has had her moments of vulnerability and internal wounded struggles. It could have been easy to slip into the recesses of her sorrow and take time to heal. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. I didn’t quite get it at that age. I was barely 16 and like any starry-eyed teenager it is safe to assume I was lost in my own sweet bubble of candy floss life.
I didn’t realize much then, the profound impact this single incident will have on us changing the life we knew, forever. I have seen my mother distraught in her those rare vulnerable moments in my younger years and never understood the pain. In my years now (hopefully) as a matured adult, I see it all clearly. I saw her pick up the pieces and move on in life. I have seen her dealing with her loss reassembling fragments of her life piece by piece to make it whole for me.
As the years went by, I never had the courage to ever ask myself let alone my mom, “what would life have been if dad were here?” or “would he have approved my college decisions?” or “would he have guided me to look in other direction?”, or “would he have approved of my life partner choice?” and so on and so forth. It is now I find myself often reflecting and contemplating on how our lives would have been had he been around. I don’t have an answer for that. I really don’t know. It could have been better, or it would have turned out exactly the way it did…who knows. The truth of the matter is my mother and my learnings from our travel together is my reality.
I have learnt my most important and valuable life lesson from her :
RESILIENCE.
It is an unrelenting and unwavering determination to continue and water life’s salt pan to slowly give way to robust harvest. I learnt that not everything is lost. What is once broken can always be put back together. Where there is pain, love, beauty and life can be created.
I carry these “learnings” as scorched stencils burned and stamped in my mind.
It is now that I have truly understood that scars are not meant to be hidden. Infact, they are meant to be worn like badges of honour because we have survived all our tragedies and struggles whether big or small to get this far.
These scars are our greatest treasure. They are part of our story.
At a certain age I feel, we are all broken vessels in some way or the other. We have mended and reconstructed ourselves back to harbor life. I find resilient ways daily to engage with the various ups and downs life hurls at me. The key is to revel in the imperfections of life, not shy away from our vulnerabilities and positively embrace the brokenness in all of us.
There is life in what is broken.
Broken in Beautiful.
Story telling through my Art
My works below tell a story of personal resilience through the layers of paint, deep impressionable marks and coming together of broken organic elements hand altered in my unique ways on the blank canvases.
I hope the above narratives inspire viewers to reflect on their own life experiences and realize the strength they find within themselves.