frayed ovenbird Your best friends will tell you the truth, he insists. The people who love you will point out every flaw so that you have a chance to correct them. They do it because they want to protect you from having the same flaws pointed out by someone else, who loves you less, or not at all, and won’t be so kind in their delivery of the news that you are fundamentally broken. You share too much, he says. It might affect how people think about you. It might be affecting your ability to make friends. He says this (he claims) because he loves me. What I hear is, you should be different. Or at least you should pretend to be different in public because no one wants to see the cracks in who you are. You must appear whole. But I am not whole and have no aspirations towards wholeness. I am ragged and fraying and I have been sewn back together so many times that I’m more seams than stuffing. Aren’t all the best loved things worn in this way? I have let myself be held by the world and it isn’t always gentle. I’ve been dragged through the mud, left out in the rain, forgotten, abandoned, chewed on. I’ve also been cried on, confided in, and held in grief. I’ve been carried and cradled and held. You can’t open yourself to the full_catastrophe of this life without emerging more than a little threadbare. I hope that by the end I’ll be little more than a scrap of terry cloth with a lone button eye. I want to live until there’s nothing left of me. I will let this life ravage me with all the beauty and pain it can summon. I will cry until I’m waterlogged and laugh until I rip open and learn to piece myself back together from rags. There is only one truth I want to tell those I love, and it is this: it's okay to shatter. I will sweep up the pieces and show you how they glitter when I hold them to the light. 250627 what's it to you? who go blather from