Art of Repairing Broken Pottery

By: Maggie Hess

Narrated by: Sophia Chance

This thought just woke me up. What if I really am courageous?

So I’m stepping back from the girl who thinks of myself as meek and incapable or crazy and a quitter. I need to remember all of the power it took to start all of the things I have started. I need to remember the person who finds herself lost in the woods and finds her legs under her and walks barefoot for her own survival.

I am a girl who chose writing as my vocation because I wanted to change the world with it. I am the girl, yes, because girls are tough, who has done a lot of things that might be called crazy, but always maintained my dignity through episodes of mental illness that were never chosen; I am the girl who did yoga in the mental ward to instate peace in my present state, who never was violent.

I am the girl who has been an activist, standing together with environmentalists fighting climate change and mountaintop removal and proclaiming voices against unilateral war long before it was cool.

I haven’t done activism for a long time, and there is a good reason for that. I have been arduously working on myself, healing myself, learning to meditate, and taking care of myself as my job. And that is just as valid and courageous as defending the other.

Standing up for myself is what I have been doing in my own way, in caring for myself. But this has been a missing link in my self-care, knowing who I am in the first place, really thinking of myself through the lens of reality, not just the daily one-step-at-a-time version.

I had seen these moments of rising: all of the starts that it took to complete 12 years of striving for a college degree, my taking up causes, my religious self-care, my commitment to my poetry, all of these ways I have followed my inner drum beat. I had seen these moments of rising and had thought, "That’s not me, though." I had thought that the rising was not me because the moments of rising were not ongoing daily tasks generally.

I had just seen the self-care and hadn’t realized all of my acts of leadership are of the same ilk as the self-care. It all is me, and it all is courageous. I had thought the special moments were just flukes. The high points and proudest times were there because of the ongoing self-care. Self-care is courageous.

Self-care can be the sum and total of a life. Or we can learn to add on additional commitments, plus taking care of ourselves. That is how it was when I packed my bags and moved almost five hours away to go to school in Kentucky. I am charging into the unknown - actually, in a direction that had hurt me before.

Going to school was the initiation of my mental illness the first time it happened. It took so much bravery just to return to school. And I left all of my usual comforts to do it, too. So I learned that at that point, I could add commitments to just taking care of myself. But after school, I returned home. I needed rest.

I let myself just draw a disability check and not work. And in doing that, any idea I might be courageous was falsely proven a passing notion. But taking the disability time has been bravery, too, especially for someone who knows my gifts.

Lately I have been adding commitments again. I do some transcribing work. I am part of an online writing support group that has been meeting for over nine months. I started an offshoot group that meets each weekday.

And now that I am getting more and more in the swing of doing more, I might be going back to school in the fall if I get accepted, and I kill the belief in myself that I can’t do it, that I am a weak, meek wimp who doesn’t have the ability to do what I really want. I can do it. I can do what I commit myself to every time, because I am smart and I am not committing myself to the wrong things at all.

I need to fix my eyes to always see myself through the lens of courage for the rest of my life.

©2021 Maggie Hess (P)2022 Maggie Hess