Is There a (New) Power Developed in Being Broken?

is there a power in being 184 Bula Explain in Writing. Evoke Through Design

is there a(new) power in 185About Design broken?

Positive Byproducts of Terrible Things

My brand new Macbook has been broken lately and I resorted to jerryrigging my dad’s old 2012 Macbook Air to get things done for school. This cuts both ways, I’m lucky enough to have a backup laptop, but sometimes simply typing on this keyboard feels like a tidal wave of emptiness and loss. His fingers used to tap away on these keys as he inefficiently hunted and pecked for keys to build words. His touch used to grace the trackpad where my fingers now drag, pinch, and spread. Knowing he made all the same gestures feels as though I just might be touching him again in a way. And if the time-space continuum didn’t exist, he’d be here right now working on this computer instead of me.

My dad should be here and I’m so angry that he’s not. I’m not angry with him, or at him, or at anyone or anything for that matter. It’s just a feeling that exists, hanging unseen like humidity in the air. I live with it, but sometimes it breaks me down, often at the most innocuous moments.

Through some random, cosmic luck, or un-luck, of the draw, my dad got an incurable brain tumor and he died. As we all will. And that’s what makes it so infuriating, it’s so banal. It was always going to be this way. Death is the only thing in life guaranteed to happen to all of us and it happened to

my dad. Only, when I least expected it. When I wasn’t prepared for it. But, then again, really when are you and how would you prepare for it anyway…? I accept it, the fact exists that he’s not here and through all the brokenness you must push on and continue to live; to grow, to change.

But there’s NOWHERE to put that kind of anger, there’s no name for it or box to label with it—‘they’ did that so I hate ‘them’, ‘it’ caused that, so I hate ‘it’—so it doesn’t come out. Or, rather, I suppress the overwhelming burning heat in my chest with a clenched jaw as steam rises off my heart and slowly, unintentionally leaks out of my eyes no matter the willpower I devote to controlling them. The water thereby creating, what some would recognize as, tears, a sign of sorrow. But I know they are simply byproducts of inflamed rage that has nowhere to go.

My dad was always the one that could intuit exactly what I needed, whether it be a soft landing spot or a swift kick start. And especially now, when I’ve finally come into his milieu, design, and I struggle with it because I love it and I’m not good at it, yet. I want so desperately to be better and I want to ask him how. I find the acute moments of loss more intermittent, but not decreased in their intensity. It’s difficult to explain the feeling of knowing that anyone in your life will listen to you, but you only want to talk to the one person that would actually understand you. And not only understand you, but see you more clearly than you see yourself, and reflect it back to you as an accurate depiction to help you find your own path forward. And trying to explain to someone you love, that they can’t help you or see you in the way you need to be seen and they’re not the right person to understand you, is heartbreaking in itself. So you silently hold it in and wonder why the one person that you wouldn’t even have to explain any of this to isn’t here to respond.

So, how can I make things when I’m so sad I feel paralyzed? Actually, the better question is how can I NOT make things when I’m so sad. Otherwise, I will stay paralyzed. So many of the things I’ve made that I’m proud of have come out of or resulted from deep sorrow. There was nothing else to pour myself into more fully that I could also use to help dig myself out of but creativity. Making and creating is the only way through the broken. In re-assembling the pieces to construct something new, I’m constantly discovering that the wreckage unearths pieces that weren’t there before, somehow the destruction has produced new growth from a barren place.

Design is the same, we break things down to their elements, see what they’re made of, try to recreate them or put the pieces back together in new and different ways. You’ll never know how strong something is—an idea or concept, a form, a person—until you try and break it down. The Japanese art of Kintsugi, or golden joinery, takes physically broken pottery and melds it back together with an adhesive containing dust of gold, silver, or platinum. Each repaired piece not only honors its unique history, but highlights the previous damage in a way that makes it even more beautiful than before. This analogy applies to my life and design methodologies. Life experiences test our mettle and forge us into stronger and more beautiful people as we build empathy through the process of breaking down and rebuilding.

The design critique reflects this process in its honesty, sometimes brutal honesty, designs (and designers) can be broken down, even shattered. But that breakdown is just a cycle in the process of building a more thorough, deeply thought out, and more beautiful end design.

You have to be willing to try, to be bad at something, oftentimes before you even know how bad you really are. You have to be willing to put yourself on the line, risk yourself to find that delight.1 In design you have to be willing to risk a lot of exposure—your judgment, your taste, your thoughts and ideals. Design is about being your authentic self and if you’re not doing that, it’s obvious. And if you are, it’s scary. Like bombing down a ski hill, or going for a big dive off a diving board, if you don’t ‘full send’ you risk mediocrity in choosing the safe thing or not exposing yourself to the toughest criticism. There’s no halfway or hold back—that’s death.

So, yes, ultimately there is beauty in the breakdown. It’s not always easy, or fun, but there’s a better anything on the other side of being broken, whether it’s a better version of yourself or a design. Breaking tells us how resilient we really are and allows us to reset, re-imagine, and then create that next iteration. And, when another break comes, you’ll know that it’s not forever and it’s just the next step in creating the next best version.

1 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/692/the-show-of-delights Ross Gay on Delight: ‘Sometimes [delight] can exist, like a kernel, at the center of misfortune.’ ‘Delight and curiosity are really tied up. You have to be OK with not knowing things. You have to be actually invested and happy about not knowing things.’ ‘I think delight might actually be more profound when you’ve experienced more, including real loss and tragedy.’ ‘When I think of joy, grown up joy is made up of our sorrow, just like it’s made up of what is pleasing to us. Often, it felt like I wasn’t going to be able to talk about delight without talking about these other things. Delight often implies its absence.’