A Personal Inventory of Once-Broken Things

Building Resilience Through Retrospection

This is probably the most personal thing I’ve written to date. I’m requiring a subscription as a safety net (for myself).

For the past couple of years, I’ve been part of a group text with a few former colleagues and friends. The backstory behind it has a “Big Chill” theme to it, as my former colleagues/friends and I reunited at the celebration of another colleague’s life, who tragically left us way too early. Our text exchanges are sometimes random, sporadic thoughts that we find ourselves mulling over. They are also occasionally generational, as we are all Gen Xers with similar yet different life experiences. Additionally, they are sometimes sparked by shared interests, such as music, art, culture, parenting, or developments in the tech world. It’s been a nice, high-signal place for me that feels comfortable and familiar, like a favorite T-shirt or a pair of jeans, and it has reminded me that, with the loss of our mutual friend and former colleague who reunited us, come unexpected gifts.

One of our recent GenX-themed text threads somehow led to us comparing notes on the physical injuries we sustained growing up as feral GenXers. We even ended up giving the exercise a name:

”Injury Inventory”

I think I went first and I kept it pretty simple, only including the biggies, while skipping all the usual skinned knees and elbows:

-Broken kneecap (hit by a car while riding a bike)
-Broken collarbone (tackle football, no gear)
-17 stitches on throat (neighbor’s dog jumped up on me and sliced my neck open. I bled like a stuck pig, and the doctor told me I was fortunate it missed the jugular)
-8 stitches over right eyebrow: (hit by softball)
-Knocked out cold once by sledding headfirst into a tree. After I regained consciousness, I asked my mom, “Do I have brain damage”?

The thread was a nice, nostalgic romp through our unsupervised adolescence, and at some point, I made a joke about how we could all bond over the common trauma we shared due to the injuries we sustained. However, after the thread, a few days passed, and I kept having this thought:

Did any of those injuries truly traumatize me?

And my inner voice answered “no”.

Even the collarbone, which I broke clean in half, was excruciatingly painful and made me cry and yelp out loud. I remember it viscerally, yet I can say with complete confidence that there is no lingering psychological impact associated with it, nor was there any conscious or subconscious PTSD. No, the worst of my childhood injuries left physical scars only—ones I can still touch and feel today, like the slight irregularity of my left collarbone, or the missing strip of hair from my right eyebrow… these are physical remnants, not psychological ones.

A Personal Inventory of Broken Things

Our text exchange and my realization that it was not physical trauma but psychological trials which are the things that left a mark, got me thinking. I should take a personal inventory. And as I thought about doing this, I also recalled the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi:

Kintsugi revolves around the idea that beauty can be found in imperfection and that flaws can be highlighted rather than hidden. Kintsugi, which translates to "golden joinery," involves repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, embracing the cracks and imperfections as part of the object's unique history.

Japanese philosophy aside, after fifteen years plus of writing (mostly business but some personal), I’ve come to embrace that I’m a writer (amongst other things). And writers write about what they know. So here’s what I know:

Broken Thing #1: Parental Detour
I became a father for the first time at 29 and then again at 31. While relatively young by professional standards, I wasn’t prepared for what happened in the first few years of transitioning into parenthood. I’m going to skip over the specific details (for now). Still, I’ll share that our boys didn’t have a typical childhood experience during their early years, nor did we have a typical parenting experience.

While other parents took their kids to parks, parties, and playdates, we consulted pediatricians, therapists, developmental psychologists, and various children’s health professionals. It felt like we were forced to take a detour on the road of what’s considered some of the most joyful years of parenthood. As a single-income family, we rapidly found ourselves in nearly $100,00.00 worth of credit card debt to help fund the services we required. Although we eventually overcame this phase of life as parents and partners, it came with a cost, as the crisis broke us in different ways.

How It Rebuilt Me:
This parental detour taught me how to speak with, connect with, and engage with others going through significant trials and tribulations. It rebuilt me as more patient, understanding, empathetic, and less judgmental. It taught me that not everything looks as it seems on the surface, and everyone has their private battles. In this regard, we are all united by struggle, and everyone is fighting some secret war.

Broken Thing #2: Relationship Shipwreck(s):
Deep breath on this one. After a decade-plus of a faithful marriage, I made a terrible and regretful decision to engage in an extramarital affair. It was the worst kind, as it first started as emotional, then led to physical. It both awakened something in me, and wrecked me (and others) all at once. It ended badly, and while it did not end my marriage immediately, it played a role in its later demise as part of several other contributing factors.

How It Rebuilt Me:
I’ve had to come face to face with why I made that fateful choice and the chain reaction it put into motion. It has made me understand that bad decisions and continued poor choices are not how to deal with deeply repressed emotions, regardless of their causes. I am simply a better life partner and man in my current relationship. I have a deeper understanding of myself, my flaws, and the strengths that come with being my true self. Like all of these broken things, there are still psychic scars from that shipwreck, sunken in deep waters, but they remind me that I survived the worst of it and live to tell the tale.

Broken Thing #3: Marriage Dissolution
I learned during my divorce process that the word “dissolution” is legalese for divorce. I assume it’s related to the notion of dissolving something. It was my decision to dissolve my marriage. Some of it was related to broken thing #2, but other significant factors existed. The broken part about the dissolution is that it turned incredibly ugly and acrimonious. It would take pages of writing to capture the amount of stress, incivility, and drama that occurred during this time of breaking, not just for me but for my family, my former spouse, and my current wife. Suffice it to say that things started with my boys living most of the time with their mother and then choosing to leave that environment to stay under my roof and stewardship. I wish this all went differently. I tried everything I could to keep it amicable and to put our boys first. But it was far too broken.

How It Rebuilt Me:
I wasn’t consistently the best husband, but I was always a good father. Yet even with that foundation, taking into account a dissolved marriage and a former spouse minimally involved in the lives of our sons, I have had to become the best version of a father I could possibly be. In short, I “stepped up”. I also had to rebuild my finances after losing half of everything I owned (and more). I did that as well. More importantly, my relationship with money and financial security has been recalibrated. Because I lost so much financially, I just don’t put a lot of stake in material things anymore. Lovely homes, cars, and vacations come and go, but they are nothing without family.

I have that, so I have everything.

Broken Thing #4: Career Interruption
Unlike every other broken thing in this inventory, this is the only one I’ve spoken about publicly. My career interruption could not have come at a worse time—month three of the 2020 global pandemic. It was also the very first time I’ve ever been laid off. I had no idea that it would feel so much like personal rejection or come at a time when the world seemed to be coming apart. Meanwhile, I had college tuition payments to make and large divorce maintenance checks to cut. My confidence was crushed. My career trajectory was altered. My sense of identity itself turned into a huge question mark. While it’s one of the most common things people go through in life—way more common than my other broken things, because it was a first for me… it truly stung and if I’m being honest, left a memorable mark.

How It Rebuilt Me:
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I didn’t spend much time and energy thinking about how layoffs impacted people until it happened to me. Sure, I reached out to folks and tried to help where possible, but it’s the difference between head knowledge and life experience—I had never gone through it. I’m much more empathetic to folks in this situation now that I’ve been through it. I try to advocate and support as many folks as I have the bandwidth for, and I use my voice to discuss this topic, something that’s been traditionally taboo. Also, I’ve since reassessed my identity and decoupled my job from it. I still invest much energy into my work, but it no longer defines me.

Broken Thing #5: Prodigal Son
My relationship with my older son was pretty fragile for a significant period. Some of it was related to broken thing #3, and some to his choices. It’s not uncommon for fathers and sons to hit rough patches, especially when a son hits adolescence and young adulthood. However, as a parent, nothing prepares you for the heartache, especially when you were once extremely close. In addition to our relationship going through rough patches, my elder son has been working through several personal struggles. For a while, I was unsure if he’d reach the stage of well-adjusted adulthood.

How It Rebuilt Me:
Dealing with difficult father-son interactions taught me how to balance understanding and compassion with tough love. It’s easy as a parent to veer too far into “best friend” territory, and it’s just as easy to end up in “my way or the highway” terrain. The brokenness of our relationship has since been mended, and with time comes maturity, understanding, and acceptance. I’ve since been rebuilt as a father who can look back and see the many things I have done right as well as what I could have done better, and I know that if and when my boys have children of their own, I’ll be able to offer words of wisdom and encouragement as they navigate parenthood. As parents, we will always welcome our children back, no matter how far they stray, just like the prodigal son of biblical times.

This inventory is a living list. There will be new additions. As I write this, I am blessed to have two living parents who are in good health at advanced ages. But that too will change, and the inventory of broken things will expand with additional cracks to be mended with precious gold over time—a Kintsugi inspired portrait of life and the human condition.

I wrote this for myself, but also for you.

Taking inventory of my own broken things was helpful. I hope it might help you as well.