Written on 13 January 2019, reflection on fragments and facade.

Fragmentation is when we close parts of ourselves off in order to avoid feeling painful emotions. We become pieces, fragments of our self rather than a cohesive whole. Fragmentation is a way to ‘cope’ in the world when we have experienced trauma or pain. It is a way to control emotion.

I feel like I lived a life of fragments. Bits and pieces scattered around the place but never collected together, matched up, pieced together to create a whole. A distorted, disassociated person of an illusion I thought I was supposed to be.

I had experiences and memories but all of them were catalogued into parts. And each part was separated so that none of them met.

Over some years I have been slowly examining the fragments. Piecing together the real parts and discarding the facade. Coming to know myself as I am, as I feel, where I am at right now.

And it is with relief that I find myself less fragmented and more complete in understanding the hurts and pain within me and no longer avoiding my feelings.

As I come to know how I feel, express myself and let the fragments paint a picture of past pain and hurts I thought were too intense to feel.

But I have been proved wrong, God designed us well. Able to cope with much more than we anticipate or intellectually know. Trusting God is reliable. Believing my false beliefs is unreliable.

The human soul is designed to feel emotion and once pain is felt and released emotionally there is room for other emotions such as love, happiness, joy.

Facade is creating a version of ourselves that we like better, that we would like to be, not the truth of ourselves, it is a mask or literally a facade the frontage that we present to the world, behind the facade is all kinds of interesting things, but we want to hide those.

I used to pride myself at being chameleon like, someone who could be what another person wanted and change myself to suit any situation. I now realize this was a series of masks or facades or fragments I had in order to hide from my own feelings about myself.

I was not comfortable being me and allowing the world to know me, I felt I had to modify me and create a fragment of myself, something palatable, acceptable to others, in order to fit in.

Fragments and facades.

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