I love the broken. The shattered. The torn. The people who have glued their pieces back together. The jagged. The misplaced. The sharp. They are the true teachers. Not the educated. People who have contemplated death. But chose to live. They love the hardest. Who have fallen into slippery wells. And crawled out lined with gold. And a fucking smile. I love those people.

They shine like stars.

John Kim, The Angry Therapist

My glass is half empty more often than it is half full.

Cynicism is one of my “character deficits,” as Andrea would say.

She’d always preface her use of psychiatric terminology around me with, “We [clinical psychologists] say X,” because after eight years of therapy, she’d learned that if she didn’t thoroughly explain herself first, I would likely take matters into my own hands, scurry down a psychoanalytical wormhole after our session, and create more work for both of us the next time.

That was one of the many reasons I adored her. She knew me better than I knew myself most of the time.

Anyway, yes. I tend toward cynicism and sarcasm when it comes to a lot of things.

Just not people.

I don’t deny there’s truth in the saying that you can’t change a person. I just think we tend to leave out the most important part: people can change. You just can’t do it for them.

And I think that’s an important distinction.

Change requires some willingness to look directly at ourselves—the flattering parts and the decidedly less flattering ones—and decide what we’re going to do about what we find.

It’s kind of funny, all the roundabout ways we find to feel better about our character deficits. Or avoid taking responsibility for what we see when we look in the mirror.

“You’re beautiful just the way you are.”

“You are not your mistakes.”

“New year, new you.”

They’re nice sentiments. Sometimes they’re even true.

But you can be beautiful and still need to change. You may not be your mistakes, but some of them may reveal parts of your character that genuinely need work. And fortunately, January 1 is not a prerequisite for doing something about it.

There is rarely a perfect or easier time.

Since the point of this blog is to be candid, here’s a truth for you: I’ve seen the inside of a psychiatric unit firsthand.

Either that makes me neurotic, a victim of the overmedicalization of America, or cool because Eminem—one of the greatest rappers of our time—has too.

Regardless, the shock value of my suffering isn’t the point.

What interests me more is what being there did to the way I see other people.

That hospital stay was humbling to the nth degree. It gave me an inside look at a handful of people who had reached some version of rock bottom and survived the blow.

And there is something deeply endearing about watching a person save themselves from themselves. Something even more special about quietly walking beside them while they do it.

If your path requires you to walk through hell, walk as if you own the place.

That’s what I was doing. Walking through hell alongside people whose lives, on paper, could not have looked more different from one another—or from mine.

There were addicts and victims. People living with mental and physical illness. People with homes and people without them. People with money and people without much at all. Young people. Old people.

Suffering, I learned, isn’t particularly interested in demographics.

Nor am I suggesting suffering automatically makes someone good. There are people who do terrible things. There are choices for which remorse does not erase consequence, and there are harms that forgiveness does not obligate anyone to overlook.

But I’m not interested here in sorting humanity into good people and bad people.

I’m interested in our fixation with normal.

We treat normalcy as though it is an objective condition rather than a line we’ve collectively drawn and agreed not to question too closely. Anything outside it becomes something to explain, conceal, diagnose, apologize for, or whisper about.

I’m not convinced normal is even real.

Let’s say I were a Jesus person. This is probably where I’d get on my soapbox and tell you we’re all sinners and God thinks we deserve grace anyway.

I’m not all that Jesus-y right now, so I’ll spare you the sermon.

What I do believe is that there is something remarkable about a person willing to confront the parts of themselves they’d rather not see and do something with them.

Speaking from experience, there is nothing quite like finishing a race you’ve spent months training for. The confidence. The accomplishment. That brief, ridiculous feeling that you’re standing on top of the world.

Strangely, I think rock bottom can teach you something about strength too.

Not because suffering is noble. Not because everything happens for a reason. And certainly not because I think we should be grateful for every terrible thing that happens to us.

But once you’re there, you have to decide what you’re going to carry back with you.

One of my old managers once gave me Steve Leder’s More Beautiful Than Before. His argument is essentially that sooner or later, every one of us will walk through some version of hell: being hurt, hurting someone else, getting sick, losing someone we love.

The point, he argues, is not to come out empty-handed.

That stayed with me.

Our suffering doesn’t automatically make us wiser, kinder, or more interesting. What we do with it might.

And perhaps that’s part of why people’s stories fascinate me as much as they do.

Years ago, during my time in retail, I was entrusted with training our newest employee.

We were working a closing shift, and foot traffic was predictably slow, so we got to talking.

Before I knew it, this woman was pouring out her heart to me.

She told me about growing up in rural America with siblings who were more or less left to fend for themselves under a parent who could be manipulative, manic, and largely uninterested in the responsibilities of parenting.

She told me about her young adult years. About shaving her head once and meeting the love of her life. About her own mental health struggles and somehow putting herself through law school anyway. About feminism. About becoming a judge on one of our state courts.

This woman fascinated me.

She had one of the most brilliant minds I’d ever encountered and a fucking incredible life story. And still, there she was on a Friday night, standing next to me in a retail shop because she’d decided to work there just for the hell of it.

Um, I’ll have what she’s having.

I later learned that in 37 years, she hadn’t told many people some of what she’d told me that night. She was apparently just as baffled as I was by whatever had compelled her to tell me.

I wasn’t baffled by what she’d shared. I was humbled that she’d trusted me with it.

To be trusted with the parts of someone’s life they don’t hand to everyone is one of the quietest compliments I know.

Maybe that’s why, for all my cynicism, I have never been particularly cynical about people.

I’ve seen people broken open. I’ve watched them make terrible decisions and better ones. I’ve watched people reach places they were certain they would never come back from, and then watched them come back anyway.

People surprise me.

And I think that’s what John Kim’s quote gets right. The people who have been shattered and put themselves back together don’t necessarily return to us pristine. They come back carrying evidence.

Perhaps that’s what makes them interesting.

You never really know what someone has survived to be standing in front of you.

I’ve found it’s usually worth giving them the chance to tell you.