Breakable.

Humpty Dumpty once sat on a wall.

That’s how the story begins, anyway. We sing, we clap, we teach phonemic rhyming patterns to preschoolers about tragedy befalling breakfast food. (beFALLING?? I’m brilliant.)

Now, I’m by no means a literalist. But our friend H. Dumpty? First of all — not an egg. Although coined as such by author Lewis Carroll in his classic Through the Looking Glass, I really think ole’ Louie was just, like, hangry for an omelet or something. Instead, Humpty D. was most likely, alleges fact-friendly and verifiable Wikipedia, a massive iron cannon used in England in the 1600s.

Can you imagine the back-breaking effort, the simple machinery, the number of stocky, caffeine-laden Crossfitters required to set this Herculean brute atop a wall as a protection, a guard, an artillery powerhouse against enemies?

However, as history or herstory (depends on the version?) attributes, a surprise blast — an explosion of crippling force — knocked this impenetrable guard down and out of commission.

Thus, the Humpty Dumpty who once sat on a wall had a great fall.

A great fall, the rhyme says. The kind that we remember by distinct smells and specific words and exact moments in blinding lights and frustratingly slow motion. A fall that knocks the wind out of our chests, suffocating us momentarily as we gasp for breath and struggle to orient ourselves with stings of pain and already forming bruises.

A fall that breaks us.

I imagine her feeling her own immeasurable weight suspended in the air as her foundation was blown from underneath her.

Yes. Although linguistically masculine in gender, I attribute her heaviness and powerful force to the “she” pronoun. She, who inexplicably feels the weight of her own fragility and holds tight to the empathy for others. She, uncomfortably large in size of her exponential feelings, who felt her wall of validity and identity fall out from under her. She, who due to gravity and force, came tumbling down without the inertia or support to reverse. Why was her wall crumbling? What happened? What could she have done differently? Why wasn’t she enough?

She, who feels the complicated burdens of inadequacy without realizing that she fell because sometimes WE FALL.

And so there she lay, in piles of her own emotional debris. Broken. Bruised.

But not alone.

Assessed. Documented. Analyzed. Fiddled with. Pieces of her jammed back painfully into tender, swollen sockets. Misshapen. The fixers tinkered with their toolbelts, but alas. They couldn’t put her back together again. Hazardous. A loss. Unfixable. Written off. After they shook their heads and click-clicked their tongues in elitist pity with hushed murmurs of “that’s too bad,” and “such a shame,” they left her, broken and rusty on the grass.

And the nursery rhyme ends.

How wildly disappointing.

But.

This isn’t the end of her story.

Of your story.

Of my story.

Silently, without attention or fanfare, people found her in the rubble. Her people, her village, came to her. They sat with her. They wept with her. They gave genuine compassion and empathy and love and cared tenderly for her cracks and breaks. They held her gently and soothed her and kissed her forehead as she called out in pained cries; they removed shrapnel and pieced together fragments of her weary soul that were shattered in the blast, that broke as she fell. Pieces of her that would never look or feel the same again.

I want to whisper a secret to you. To my girls. To me.

It’s okay to break.

We were absolutely designed to be breakable.

The gravity of ours and others missteps, our precariously balanced emotional equilibriums, our internal calibrations that hover in survival mode — we WILL inevitably fall. And with every step we take each day, either timid or bold, we know with experiential knowledge that everything we know — the walls we sit upon, our fortresses, our foundations, our bastions — could change.

Everything. And it’s okay.

It’s okay to sit on the highest wall.

It’s okay to have a great fall.

It’s okay to hurt and to break and to change.

It’s okay to get back up.

It’s okay to do it all over again.

As tragically complex as our bodies, our minds, and our hearts may be — oh, how deliciously resilient and hardy they CAN be.

Eventually, quietly, relentlessly, painfully, we will feel the peaceful signs of healing. The moments of growth that show us just how far we have come. Just how much fear we’ve faced. Just how much we wanted to overcome. We see the scars fading, and we feel a semblance of wholeness. A different wholeness altogether — one that encompasses new experiences and grief and turmoil but also readily available empathy and compassion. And now is where we climb to even higher heights, breathing in the clear air from the snowiest peaks of the highest mountains.

We must be stronger and braver now.

And always still breakable.