A Little Bit Broken

Sometimes things have to fall a little bit apart in order to come together. Including me.

Photo by Elle Storset on Unsplash

It was time to buy a house. My boyfriend was ready to start looking; possibly find his next home, possibly find a flip, he didn’t know, but the time where he was currently renting was coming to an end.

Within a day of looking, that was it. He’d found one. Stumbled upon it driving around after work and contacted the realtor from his previous home sale to get a tour. (This is a story about experience, I promise. Just bear with me. We’ll get there).

After the walk through, the excitement was palpable. The plans he laid out were grand, and he had them planned to a T. “This wall will go down, and I’ll put a door there. That will be the laundry, and here will be the guest room….”

Everything looked great on paper, all the ideas drawn in graphite and smudged with the massive rubber eraser on neatly lined grids. I’d even stopped by the hardware store to pick up paint samples just for fun, and he had chosen a color scheme. Next thing we knew, he had the inspections lined up.

The day of the inspections was ungodly hot, something obscenely over 100°F, and the AC was broken in the room we all decided to gather in to go over the findings. Why did we gather in the hottest room of the house, you ask? Don’t ask me, I have no idea. Probably to make this story more amusing for the retelling down the line….

“The septic’s fine,” one man says. “Absolutely nothing wrong.”

Something that had settled on my shoulders lifted with those words.

“There’s no spiders, no beetles, it’s pretty clean overall,” the pest inspector says.

Another weight is lift-

“Except the termites in that wall, that wall, and over there.”

Slam. The weight comes crashing back down.

I turn to my boyfriend, expecting to see the same weight curving his shoulders forward, maybe making his features fall just a little. But instead, he just nods and says, “Okay.”

Okay? Okay?

Nothing worrying, no hesitation, just a little nod and an “okay”?

It didn’t stop there. The roof needed to be replaced. Some siding. Insulation in the attic. The list went on and on, with terms I didn’t fully understand but sounded massive in my mind.

But he didn’t even flinch. Just nodded and gave another, “Okay.”

Okay. Okay. Was that code?!

Was there something I was completely missing or-

The next day the realtor called him with her recommendation on how to go in with an offer. He agreed and sent it in. I was terrified that the sellers would be offended and simply say no, and the house, the ideas, all that planning would just be…. gone.

The following day, early morning, they accepted the offer, no counter.

As I sat there washing my hair later that afternoon it came to me that all those things had to go wrong in order for the end result to be right….

And how that so often applies to life. (I told you it was about experience).

How things have to fall a little bit apart in order to come together.

Not one thing in life goes truly according to plan. There’s always something, some hiccup, that alters the list just a bit.

But I guarantee if you go back and look, sometimes that slight alteration made it fall into place all the more snuggly.

This is something I understand on a very intimate basis.

I suffer from multiple chronic health conditions, many of them “invisible,” but every bit as debilitating.

Every day I have a plan, a road map, if you will, for how I want things to work out, but sometimes before I’m even out of bed, we have a hiccup. Sometimes I make it till after breakfast. Sometimes till evening. But the day would be suspicious if it actually worked correctly.

So often it can get overwhelming and I feel somewhat trapped in my own body, like I’m still that 17 year old dancer who could get up at 8 AM and go until 2 AM, every day with no problem…. But I’m not. I have a body that would riot if I even thought of doing that again, and would make sure I didn’t try again.

And I’ll admit, sometimes I get a little huffy about it.

But then I remember.

Sometimes things have to fall a little bit apart in order to come together.

Including me.

How boring I would be if everything just worked out perfectly.

Let there be hiccups.

Let there be errors.

I’m here for the typos.

The autocorrect, and the messages with *’s after that almost always lead to laughter.

The GPS that doesn’t take you to the right place, or the AI that can’t process that right now.

Wherever the road takes me, and however it decides to tell my story, I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the ride.

And remember: things have to fall a little bit apart in order to come together. (See, aren’t you glad you kept reading?)

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This article was originally published on The Mighty.