Survival is Worth the Brokenness

I’ve watched a few medical dramas in my time. Okay, a lot. Without fail there is always a scene where a patient who was previously thought to be healthy and fine suddenly crashes. The room fills with medical staff, nurses are flinging IVs and needles and someone is sweating through chest compressions. The patient gasps, eyes wide, and everyone is relieved – he made it. Roll credits, time to go home, happy ending for all. Unless you watch Grey’s Anatomy, then your favorite character is probably going to be carried away by a protected bird of prey or die in some other incomprehensible way while in the parking lot.

The problem with these scenes of survival is that the story ends there. We see the patient pull through, grateful, strong. We see everyone relax and sigh that the crisis is over. We see loved ones laughing in the corner, basking in the glow of recovery as the camera pans past the room.

We don’t see the bruises.

We don’t see the broken ribs.

We don’t see the side effects of pushing a lot of powerful medications in a small amount of time.

Survival, sometimes, requires brokenness. CPR and other life-saving measures can be violent, painful. They may save you, but they will hurt you. Re-starting someone’s heart, electrocuting them ever so slightly, guiding a tube or a sharp instrument into someone’s body – those are invasive, painful moves, means justified by the end, but traumatic either way.

Survival can hurt you. Survival will hurt you. Having scars or aches or some broken pieces doesn’t mean you lost, it means you survived. You just have to know that survival is worth the brokenness.

Sometimes there are toxic relationships that require you to break, to tear away part of your heart by ending the relationship or cutting off contact. When it hurts to love someone, when someone you love hurts you, survival is worth the brokenness.

Sometimes there are crises we face. Medical emergencies, job losses, financial disasters, car wrecks. Survival takes pain. You scramble, you hustle, you pray, you beg, you do whatever you have to do to make it through, and you survive. Your pride may crumble, you probably won’t smile much. Actual survival doesn’t look much like the determined heroine in the movies with ferocity in her eyes and gloss on her lips – more often it looks like the woman with her head down, crushed and tear-stained, desperate, depressed, and barely hanging on. She may not look like much, but she is surviving.

Having a child with special needs, that’s a lot of survival. Painful survival. Sometimes the moment of gasping after being resuscitated doesn’t come for 18 years. Sometimes there’s no known end and you just survive for a really, really long time. You try this therapy and that therapy, you gain hope from understanding and get crushed by the setbacks.

Living with depression is nothing but survival. You ache from the pain, both physical and emotional. Sometimes your body is a road map of what has worked and what hasn’t. Sometimes your night stand is littered with bottles of what worked and what didn’t. Sometimes you feel the broken bones and the bruised tissues of trying so hard for so long to just keep living, and you wonder if it’s worth this pain, if the life-saving measures are worth it.

Survival, friend, is worth the brokenness. You aren’t hurting because you’re losing, you’re hurting because you’re surviving. You are aching, stinging, maybe even immobile. But you are surviving.

If you need to isolate yourself for a little while in order to focus on your mental health or just to rest, do it. If you need to end a relationship in order to live your life, do it. If you need to take medication or attend daily therapy or do something really, really hard that will not be convenient in any way and will likely hurt, do it to survive. Take the broken bones that come from chest compressions to keep your heart beating. Take the scars that come from surgical procedures and keep yourself functioning. Take the pain from what you’re going through and know that it doesn’t mean it’s beating you.This pain doesn’t mean that something is wrong, it means you made it. This pain isn’t a defeat, it isn’t a sign you shouldn’t keep going, and it isn’t the only thing you’ll ever feel again. Survival requires brokenness, but brokenness, like you, will eventually heal.

You will make it. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to suck. It’s going to break you. But you will survive. And survival is always worth the brokenness.