Putting Myself Back Together

I bought a really nice newspaper rack today. It was one of those foldable things and came in black leather and stainless steel.

What surprised me was that when they handed me the box, I saw that I had to assemble it myself. Now, this is the catch - I have never assembled anything in my life by myself before. I always had somebody who assembled things for me. So imagine my anxiety when I saw the screws and dismantled parts waiting for me to put them together.

But I had no choice. I had to do it. So I briefly looked at the instructional diagram that came with it and set down to work.

This rack was designed with two crossing bars on each end and joined by four horizontal bars – two above and two below. Across the horizontal bars, you have to insert alternating leather bands to form the body itself.

I was almost done and putting on the end bar to seal my masterpiece, when I realized that it wouldn’t fit. I looked at the diagram again, more carefully this time, and realized that I didn’t put the horizontal bars correctly. In my lackadaisical manner, I just screwed in the bars without realizing that they were not all of the same size and that each bar had to be placed in a specific spot. So I had to dismantle the whole thing and start all over again.

This newspaper rack suddenly mirrored the life I was living.

I, too, was, broken and in pieces a lot of times in my life. Circumstances in my past have left deep marks and wounds that have rendered me undone. And similarly, I always waited for somebody to fix me up – “to assemble things for me”. I would go into relationships expecting the other person to put me back together.

I was slow to learn that rather than fixing me up, what I was doing was actually messing me up some more. I realized that no person can repair me other than myself. That Jerry Maguire was wrong and there was nobody out there who will be able to “complete me”. I alone possess the diagram to build myself into the person that I was meant to be.

I also realized that sometimes, we put the pieces of ourselves together without careful introspection. We make decisions haphazardly, too impatient to take the time and examine things fully. We want everything now and at this instant. Not fully grasping that maybe what we thought we wanted was not really serving our purpose. Until you get to the end of the line, thinking that you have got it made, only to realize that the pieces wouldn’t fit. That no matter how hard you try and force things to connect, it does not work. That the life you were living was not really filling you up the way you imagined it to.

You are then faced with no other choice, but to dismantle your whole self again and start all over. Only this time, you know you have to do things differently from before. As Albert Einstein once said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

I am in a major crossroad in my life. I am once again broken and in pieces. What differs is that I am finally learning to put the pieces by myself, knowing that I have all the resources I need and trusting that if the diagram gets to be very complicated and difficult to decipher, guidance will come.