Unseen Beauty: A Journal

Misfit Toys

There’s something about Rudolph. Most of us, children of the seventies and eighties, finding our feet as career-oriented adults remember the event of watching Rudolph on TV, long before the advent of watch-when-you-want VHS and DVD. So, perhaps the return of the audience to the familiar holiday classic may simply be chalked up to nostalgia, but perhaps there is something more there. As a lover of myth and meaning, I choose to see something a little more subconscious there. Perhaps we recognize the place where we live in the faded Technicolor of stop motion animation.

In so many ways, we all live on the island of misfit toys. The more I interact with the world, the more I realize that we are, each and every one of us, broken in some way. No one makes the journey through life without being dropped, cracked, discarded. We are never what we expected to be, or what the others around us expect us to be. Whether we recognize it or not, we are misfits, broken creatures lost in a place that frequently seems hopeless and overwhelming.

The proof of our broken and misfit state is everywhere. Half of the people I know are on anti-depressants or mood regulators of some type. The media in all its forms is saturated with advertising that promises relief for physical and mental distress, and the statistics on depression in America and Europe are staggering. Beneath the veneer of public image, “I’m okay, you’re okay” looks much more like, “I’m screwed up, and you’re really broken.”

But the broken-ness of the individual isn’t the point on which we must focus as we struggle through our lives. There is little question that we are broken; the question is what we do about it.

For some, that question isn’t even a part of their consciousness. They live in the present, so completely in the swirl of social interaction and bright consumerism that they avoid looking at the spiderweb of cracks and the stress fractures under their surface. They view themselves as whole, as fitting in, and any suggestion to the contrary simply inspires a new spate of frenetic action. If they keep moving, they will never have to acknowledge or to deal with the possibility of brokenness.

Others acknowledge their status as broken, and give up on ever being anything else. The fact that they are broken in a world that holds up an ideal of perfection is too much for them. They see all too clearly that they are misfits, inadequate or damaged in some way, and all they can focus on is the breakage. The cracks are all they see; they know that there is no repair complete enough to restore them to the standard of wholeness they view as necessary, and they retreat into their own pain and into the company of others equally broken. And, more often than not, the stress of their sorrow damages them even further, spinning their pain into a deepening cycle of self loathing and breakage.

But for the rest of us, there is hope – there has to be hope. We are broken, misfit, and we know it. We see the damage, the misassembled bits and parts. Some things don’t work; some things overwhelm us; and some things are simply impossible for us. But we refuse to stop trying, to stop hoping that we still have value, functionality, beauty. We find others whose fracture lines meet up with our whole parts, and we find strength in each other. Beauty, magic, and love are more than words for us – they are the religion of the misfits, the things we have to believe in to survive, to patch ourselves together, to escape our island in order to serve the purpose we trust we were meant to fulfill.

I may be a misfit toy, cobbled together from broken pieces, but I believe in hope. I believe that every one of us has a home, a place where we belong, whether that place is here in the mundane, or elsewhere in magic and wonder. The world is a difficult place to live when you’re broken, but I believe in life, in the validity of the struggle, and I will continue to live with all of my pieces bound together with faith and with hope. For me, the mantra of the broken is “I will never stop trying because I never know what miracle will be waiting for me around the next corner.” My chips and cracks are what make me unique, I bear my brokenness with a dark humor and a curious pride: I am me, and that is, for today, enough.