Glass? Clay!

"Are you saying that no matter how screwed up I was, you'd still expect me to work wonders?" Appalling.

She considered this. "Yes," she smiled serenely. "In fact, since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same."

It wasn't just his father who had made Miles crazy, Mark decided.

-Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold

The latest dealing-with-upsetting-topics meme is the sexual violence meme, which touched down more than once on my friends list this week. Like the "bullying is bad" meme that went around some time ago, it's generating a lot of energetic discussion, both in favor of the meme (raising awareness and helping people overcome the stigma associated with rape) and against (trivializing the issue. And, of course, the trolls). What I find astonishing is the enormous amount of pain humans inflict on each other, and how we manage to put our lives back together. Some of the people I most respect have come through some really horrible experiences to get where they are today. You talk to these happy, busy people, and sometimes they'll say something about a neglectful parent, the Date from Hell, suicidal depression, and you wonder how they ever got past those things. No one I know has had a "perfect" life. And, on the whole, we still manage to live without being dominated by the really traumatic stuff that's happened to us. And however unthinkable your situation may be, it's very likely someone else has been there, and has moved on, so that you'd never think they'd been assaulted, or abused, or had a particularly vicious cancer, or been an alcoholic. Then they mention it and you're shocked, because it's such a non-issue most of the time.

People are fragile, like glass: a little pressure shatters them. People are resilient, like clay: find the pieces and they can be remade. I think that's what this type of meme is about. Letting people say, "I've been there, and there's a way past the moment." The trick is that you can be told there is a road, but you have to find and walk it yourself.