I’m NOT Broken, Because This Wasn’t a Typical Love Story
By: Justin Dickens
Tags: Self Love, Vulnerability, Nonbinary, LGBTQ, Divorce

I know most of you are thinking. Justin, you clearly have healing to do. Take it slow you beautiful human. And, I hear you. Thank you. I hesitate to say you are wrong, while I also listen to the truth inside me. Maybe these reflections are merely a result of the healing I’ve been doing… but this felt more like an epiphany. I’m not saying I don’t have healing to do. Connecting to radical self-love is journey I am fully on, one of healing, and one with origins way before marriage. And, throughout our marriage, I was on that journey, to reconnect with myself. The human I came into this world as, before society and all it’s boxes got ahold of me. That journey of mine, made marriage complicated. There were times when I felt broken, when I felt really broken. But, in those moments, what I was exploring, was not my brokenness and I always knew; it was the world’s brokenness, other people’s brokenness. Allow me to explain with a corny metaphor I thought of.

I hit pause… on life. Many times. All the moments that were truly hard. Devastating. I was living life on pause. And it was a painfully conscious choice to do so. The DVD wasn’t scratched so bad it wouldn’t play. Remember when your favorite films got scratched so bad that they worked to a point, but you could never finish the movie? That’s not what was happening. The Wi-Fi was not down, and we didn’t lose the remote. I just hit pause from time to time, when I realized people around me, weren’t ready for the rest of the movie. There was nothing broken about me. I chose to push pause. I always saw them as decisions; every single time, and that’s how we discussed them. But, life was on pause never the less. And, life has been a good movie. A great movie in fact. Fantastic. It’s not a movie you would settle for not getting to finish. So, you know the feeling. You’re dying to get on with the movie, but it’s still paused. Somebody needs to go to the bathroom, that person’s getting popcorn, now somebody’s parent called them…. The world was full of reasons for the movie to be paused. Now, at the risk of making a very complex, emotional journey far too simple. When we decided to get a dissolution, I pressed play again. What you saw from me after that, was undoubtedly emotional. I was overwhelmed, unsure of what to think, didn’t know how to feel, didn’t know if it was true. It looked like brokenness, even felt like it to me. But what it really was? After waiting for what seemed like an actual life time, I had the chance before me, to continue watching the movie I had been waiting most of life to see… you know those kind of movies. They make you feel some way.

I understand why I am supposed to feel broken, to go slow, to spend time with myself. I really do. I’m not sure I’m even correct about all this. But, one thing I know about me, is that I listen to myself. And, I feel these things on a spiritual level. A huge barrier to radical self-love, for me, is feeling broken. It’s manipulative, deceptive, and coercive. But, I know in my soul (you know the depth of thought that gives you chills), when I was at my lowest points in life, I was not broken. I was hitting the pause button on a movie I was dying to continue, and that, as you all know, is exhausting after a while.