Cracked like an Egg

He said something needed to break, a statement he made right after snapping my hip like a twig. Chiropractors always astound me with their ability to twist your spine like bubble wrap and send you off feeling better.

It'd been a long week. The middle of a long month, actually.

Snow had kept me from getting any help after my sacrum decided to take a stroll outside the socket. Every year and a half or so, for no particular reason at all, my spine gets bored with being aligned and my hip decides to do a walk about, see the sights, try a new adventure, and find out for itself whether there isn't a better party happening somewhere else.

When it happened this last time, there wasn't a lot I could do about it other than whine and complain and roll around on the floor trying to find that magical combination of leg stretches and back twists and pinky movements that would miraculously shove anything outside it's God-designed position back in again.

I didn't find it.

Finally, after my scale of pain went from a three to a nine and jumping off my porch roof was the only thing left I hadn't tried, a friend rescued me with a 4-wheel drive vehicle and a chiro appointment.

My hero.

As recovery has stopped and started and stopped again and started back again and still I find myself walking around with a ziplock of ice strapped to my side, I keep hearing those words: Something had to break.

Oh really.

He didn't mean it as a life lesson, only a statement about my hip bone. Still, I've thought about it a lot.

Something had to break.

It seemed so brilliant, in a macabre way.

Something had to break.

There are a few "something"s in my life. Probably yours, too. Like preconceived notions, preconceived plans, a desire you shouldn't have, a want you don't need, a belief about yourself that simply isn't true, ignorance about yourself that needs some truth, a feeling of inadequacy or lethargy or general malaise. Who knows, maybe you simply need to snap out of the monotony in your life to remember why you love it.

"It" being you're life, that is.

I can relate. I have a few of those. Anything from plans for myself that aren't going according to the plan, to ceilings I've constructed that simply need to rot and crumble to the ground. When I look, when I really look, I can see that something has to break.

And, honestly, that just blows.

Breaks are painful. There's discomfort and swelling and lots of time to find blame, find self-pity, or find yourself mourning. Then there's the healing, which always takes so blooming long, and all the work needed for recovery, which takes so much blooming energy.

Then there's the rebuilding part. That means sweating through the reconstruction and finding stronger made materials. It also requires accepting your reconstruction plans might also get scrapped in the middle of the project for a design far superior. All of it taking you back to square one.

And it means finally accepting the fact your current path simply wasn't working as is.

So something had to break.

Who knows what that means for my wayward hip. Maybe it'll realize I love it best of all and come home. Perhaps that means some of the strongholds in my life don't have to be so strong.

Perhaps it means, despite my previous or even current belief, I'm stronger than what I think. It was just that one bone. One out of many. And all it needed was a gentle, perfectly placed, divinely timed, c-r-a-c-k.

Maybe as early as tomorrow I won't even notice the scar.