I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

Have you ever had the great fortune of filling up balloons with helium? You should have read that first line in the sarcasm font. If you haven’t experienced this feat of strength, congratulations, as it is a task that, while simple, can be unnecessarily complicated. Balloons don’t always do what you want balloons to do. For those who have never done this task, let me walk you through the emotion of being at the helium tank.

When you place the balloon on the nozzle, you are confident—it’s a small piece of plastic, and perhaps you’ve even done this before. You confidently begin letting air fill the space. As it rises from its smallest form to the middle, you remain confident, but your awareness begins to awaken. You can no longer be asleep at the wheel of this job. Finally, you near the part where tensions rise. Many stop at this point, scared to feel and hear the popping of a balloon gone wild.

You are seconds away from watching an explosion, but you might also time it too short and watch your balloons begin to deflate mid-party. And no one likes a mid-party letdown (a fun double entendre for the adults in the room).

This process of filling balloons is a perfect metaphor for what it feels like to grow as a human and, more directly, what it feels like internally to experience a moment of change, even if it is self-directed and decided. For many of us (me), fear walks into the room when new worlds, ways of being, and knowledge arrive and start to fill us up. As you start to see the world as something new and as you begin to feel it changing you, the discomfort starts; you’re a balloon on the verge, and once filled to its brim, an explosion occurs, and new things manifest into reality. What was once a solid object is fractured into many pieces.

Pieces are not what we are taught to live with.

As humans, we are terrified of becoming pieces of ourselves. Even the doctrine around health is about the whole. We are obsessed with being whole, and very few people are brave enough to be in pieces, even if for a while, even if it brings forth something “better.”

Speaking from my experience as an American, it’s hard to navigate this country when you're falling into pieces. It's important that I remind us that falling apart is not innately a bad thing; trees shed their leaves in the winter and bring forth new life in the spring. We witness this natural falling apart yearly, but we are sadly not trees. When you need to get up and make money to survive, raise a family, and deal with yourself, where would you even find the time to break into pieces? I believe this is why most of us struggle with the idea of being in pieces. It is difficult for most to make peace with; it has no foundational purpose in a world that wants you to be formed and remain whole. Ask people who are sick or grieving what they’d say on this matter. However, the thing about the pieces is that they have a chance to become something new, but you have to appreciate newness even to go there.

For instance, I might look at the pieces of an exploded balloon on the floor and think of them as trash, whereas an artist—perhaps the thing you are becoming if you allow those pieces to happen—might see art. They see something new, something necessary. They might even see the capacity for those fragments to become whole again but in a new way.

As I type this, I am trying to figure out how to release my fear of falling into pieces as all the newness I am experiencing fills me up so thoroughly that I fear I am close to exploding. Perhaps after being fractured for a while, I’ll come back together as something partially new, with my parts rearranged differently but fit for the road ahead.

I am the pieces of my former self, and I pray we are better for the falling apart.

Dear America, I am talking to you, too.

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