Personal Reflection
We spend our youth believing we can outrun the breaking. We think strength means staying intact, uncracked, untouched by loss. But the world has a way of teaching otherwise. It doesn’t ask permission before it takes something from you — it just keeps carving until all that’s left is what can’t be taken.
Hemingway understood that kind of strength — the kind that’s not visible until after everything else is gone. The kind born from what survives the fracture. Brokenness doesn’t make us less whole; it makes us more true. The places we seal with gold, with grit, with sheer will — those become our proof of living.
The mistake isn’t in breaking; it’s in pretending the wound never happened. The body remembers, the soul remembers, and if we’re lucky, we learn to move differently — not out of fear, but out of reverence.
Sometimes strength isn’t the rebuilding of what was lost. Sometimes it’s learning to carry the crack like a scar that hums when it rains — a reminder that you’re still here, and somehow, still capable of beauty.
Reflective Prompt
What part of your story did you once call broken that now carries your strength?
Can you trace the light that seeps through the cracks you tried so long to hide?
Memoirs of Madness 