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Soul cracked open
Called my people
Carved out joy
-安天美
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What is this breaking but the most honest thing your body has ever done? You wake and the shell you built around yourself lies in pieces, and for the first time in months you can breathe. You broke because you were never meant to live inside such small containers.
There is something almost sacred about the sound of your own limits finally snapping. Like the crack of ice on a river when spring arrives, sudden and inevitable and releasing what was always meant to flow. You had been holding yourself so carefully, so precisely, that you forgot what it felt like to exist without constant vigilance. The breaking is your exhale. Finally.
But why do we fear the crack more than the suffocation? Why do we cling to containers that no longer fit? Perhaps because wholeness, we think, should look unbroken from the outside. Perhaps because we mistake rigidity for strength, closure for completion. But today you learn that breaking can be the most intelligent thing a person can do.
You lift the phone and suddenly you are recognising that you were never meant to carry everything alone. Your voice, when it comes, carries the weight of every time you swallowed the words "I need help." Every time you chose the small death of isolation over the vulnerable life of asking.
Who taught you that needing people was weakness? Who convinced you that independence meant emotional exile? The voice that answers your call doesn't sound surprised by your breaking. They sound relieved that you finally remembered they exist, that you finally trusted them with the weight of your humanity.
Connection, you realise, isn't something that happens to you. It's something you create by being willing to be seen in your incompleteness, by refusing the myth of self-sufficiency that keeps everyone lonely. Your call becomes an invitation for someone else to be useful, to matter, to love in a way that actually makes a difference. This is the exchange that saves everyone involved.
What is joy but the refusal to let circumstances have the final word about the texture of our days? We do not wait for happiness to arrive like weather, unpredictable and beyond our influence. We take hammer and chisel to the stone of this difficult season and we make something beautiful anyway.
This carving requires a particular kind of courage that insists on creating meaning from whatever materials are available. The courage that says: even here, especially here, in the wreckage of my best-laid plans, I will make something worth having.
The joy we carve bears no resemblance to the joy we once imagined. It is not smooth or predictable or comfortable. It has rough edges and tool marks and the fingerprints of struggle all over it. But it is ours in a way that borrowed happiness never could be. It is joy that knows its own worth because it knows the cost of its making.
Perhaps this is what it means to be alive. To build and break and build again, each time with greater wisdom about what actually matters. To discover that your people were always there, waiting for you to trust them with your fragile places. To learn that joy is not a feeling that visits but a practice that transforms us.
You are not the same person who woke up intact this morning. You are someone who has practiced the radical art of falling apart safely, someone who knows the difference between breaking down and breaking open. Someone who understands that strength includes the wisdom to crack when cracking serves your larger becoming.
Tomorrow you will wake and the work will still be there, but you will meet it differently. Not as someone who must carry everything alone, but as someone connected to people who choose to matter to each other. You wake up as someone who knows how to make joy with her own hands from whatever the day provides.
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A Birthday Reflection for Cynthia, Someone Who Carves Joy Daily
Two years ago, through the beautiful accident of mutual friendship, Cynthia walked into my life carrying climbing shoes and an invitation I didn't know I needed. What started as rock climbing lessons became something much more profound: a masterclass in how to approach life with open hands and an open heart. Watching you these past months, I've witnessed someone who truly embodies what it means to crack wide open to possibility, to call on people without hesitation, and to carve joy from whatever materials the day provides. You don't just talk about these things. You live them so naturally that it makes the rest of us remember what's actually possible when we st op protecting ourselves from our own aliveness.
As you step into this new year of life, I'm struck by how you've taught me that getting what you want isn't about manipulation or luck, but about radiating the kind of energy that draws good things toward you because you genuinely celebrate what you already have. Living with you has been like having a daily reminder that joy is indeed something we create with our own hands, not something we wait to receive. Thank you for showing me, in real time and in real life, what it looks like to be someone who chooses wholeness and community with active joy. Happy birthday CY!!!
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<aside> <img src="/icons/backward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/backward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Moral Goodness
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<aside> <img src="/icons/forward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/forward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> When Prophecy Becomes Reality: From Observing Crisis to Living It
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