Reassembled

As humans, we will experience numerous times when a red line is brutally marked through something we begrudgingly believed to be our life path—what we thought was meant to be a part of our life story.

In her book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert digs into her creative process and shares her perspective on creative living beyond fear. In one chapter she describes the process of publishing her first short story in her early twenties. Gilbert explains how a month before the story was meant to be sent to press she was told that something had gone awry and she had to choose between pulling the story or cutting it down by thirty percent. Suddenly, Gilbert was in a position where she was forced to make a choice: deconstruct the story she labored over for a year and a half—the story she believed at the time to have been the best thing she’d ever written—or pull it entirely from the magazine. After choosing to stick with the potential gain of publication, she took a red pencil and cut the story down to the bone. She describes how while the initial devastation was shocking, in the end she, “was amazed to discover that [her] work could be played with so roughly—torn apart, chopped up, reassembled—and that it could still survive, perhaps even thrive, within its new parameters.”  

While Gilbert is describing her physical and emotional experience amputating her beloved short story, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to my own life’s story: replacing “work” in the text with the word “heart.” It was my heart, my identity, actually, I would even go as far as to say my life (or at least the constructed vision I had for it) that felt viciously torn apart—shattered—after the unexpected death of my dad when I was twenty-one.

But Gilbert goes on to explain that she did not give up or feel discouraged after tearing apart her hard work, even after realizing the story she had once written didn’t have the same meaning or logic anymore. Obviously, she was not able to reconstruct the short story back to the way it was, but that was never the end goal. Instead, Gilbert refers to the reassembling of her words as a “fantastic creative challenge.” After repinning sentences together, she explains how the cuts had in fact transformed the entire story—this new version of text was profoundly different.  

In fact, she goes on to explain how the short story became something that she would have never known she could write, reminding her of dreams that leave you with the feeling that your life has more possibility to it than you thought it did. 

And that’s just it! The unexpected death of my dad viciously shattered me into pieces and left me in a space where I would never be the same. I would never be able to go back to what was. But through the process of writing my memoir, I have come to understand that while viciously cut like Gilbert’s short story, my own life story was reassembled with purpose, and I became new—profoundly different. A “different” that wouldn’t just survive, but could thrive in new parameters. These new parameters are beyond what I ever thought could exist—a life with more possibility to it than ever imagined. 

Reassembled is not a book about answers, as life’s “fantastic creative challenge” is on going, but it stands as an invitation for you, the reader, to reflect on your own personal shattering and reassembling. 

As humans, we will experience numerous times when a red line is brutally marked through something we begrudgingly believed to be our life path—what we thought was meant to be a part of our life story. But the power to recreate comes in the reassembling, ultimately illuminating an authentic purpose we might not have known was possible. It is a purpose beyond the limitations of our lived experience, and it transforms our lives in sacred ways. 

As Glennon Doyle writes in her book, Untamed, “If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled. You are whole again, and strong, but you are suddenly a new shape, a new size. The change that happens to people who really sit in their pain―whether it’s a sliver of envy lasting an hour or a canyon of grief lasting decades―is revolutionary. When that kind of transformation happens, it becomes impossible to fit into your old conversations or relationships or patterns or thoughts or life anymore…You look around and see everything freshly, with the new eyes you have earned for yourself. There is no going back.” 

While Gilbert was given a choice―to cut her story or pull it from publication entirely―in life we are often not given a choice; if we are, our innate reaction is to steer clear of pain and fear. In my experience I did everything within my control to avoid any potential of shattering, the fear of pain too strong. But what if our greatest fears―change, failure, death, uncertainty―have the ability to teach us about life in a raw and beautiful way? 

I have come to learn, just as Doyle suggests, that by living beyond fear―letting ourselves shatter―we allow for revolutionary self transformation beyond our ordinary limitations; for there is great power in the reassembling.

Glennon Doyle, Untamed, New York: The Dial Press, 2020.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic, New York: Riverhead Books, 2015, p. 229-232.