Feeling raw in this life can be the hardest thing there is. But it's the only thing, for me. I don't want to - I will not live a watered down life, for anyone. I know now that I do not want to have to self-edit what I think / feel / or say, just to make someone else feel comfortable. Why oh why do I keep walking around trying to make people feel ok or comfortable, when my journey is about moving beyond the boundaries of comfort and ease. It's about finding the strength through the hardness, the joy inside the pain. It's about making mistakes, and not covering them up or trying to pretend they don't exist, but instead showing them off. 

The Japanese art of Kintsugi does just that. Take a broken cup or bowl, and don't glue it back together with boring glue, but instead find the gold powder and use it to add to the pain of the break, to add story, vitality. To show where beauty, pain and breaking co-exist. To acknowledge the depths of sadness at a loss, and allow it to be part of our story, not to push it down, hide it away. 

Living, for me, is about talking of my whole self. Not the self that people think that I should be talking, not the easy self that society or social media, or regular media talks about. But the full spectrum. Sometimes beautiful, often ugly, but never boring or plain or hidden. 

I know that this way of living hurts more than anything else. I've experienced it. Living by giving my heart to someone else, and having them crush it. And knowing that still my heart lives on, loves on, moves forward and around. That the more my heart is broken by the pain of life, or living, of being stood on or crushed or ignored or ridiculed, the more this happens - the stronger it becomes. The more it beats inside me with such a force that it cannot be contained. 

My heart wants to be broken for the pure joy of knowing that in the breaking, comes the opening. Once broken it can not be what it was before. In the breaks, and the cracks - that there is where I can find myself. 

Two quotes that probably could sum up everything so much more eloquently than me, but of course I'll keep trying. Because we must tell our stories in our words. 

"God breaks the heart again and again, until it stays open" Sufi Hazrat Inayat Kahn.

"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" Leonard Cohen

I’ve written, in my soon-to-be-realised book about using the broken and the mending in our creative work, and our self-work. I can’t wait to share it with you when it’s launched in September.