Cracks

I'm generally a very contemplative person. I just think a lot. I ponder things deeply and I ponder them often. I end up having nights like this one where it's well past midnight and I should have been asleep hours ago, but there's somehow a million little thoughts just taking up all the space in my brain, almost as if it were to burst at the seams.  And yet, somehow, there remains inside me an infinite amount of space to think.

So I think about myself. I think about others.  I think about my friends, and the thousands of unique experiences that I've had that have brought me to where I am today. I get so easily caught up in the things around me that make me think more deeply, the things that make me analyze my own character.  One of those things for me, recently, was a book I just finished called Paper Towns, written by John Green.

I feel like I should preface my thoughts about the novel by first saying that I've read a few novels by John Green now. And the funny thing is that every time I start reading one I never have very high expectations for what I'm going to read. Which, in retrospect, is absolutely ridiculous, because I've never read a piece of work by John Green that doesn't make me feel like I've changed in some way.  I would never pretend to know what his writing process looks like because it has to be incredibly different for every writer. However, when I read the things that he writes, I come to a realization every single time that he gives his characters a depth that we rarely see in real life.

It's not that there's a lack of depth there, though.  It's not that John Green is some mastermind with extraordinary talent in inventing a personality with more depth than is realistic.  It's the fact that he's a mastermind in unveiling the depth that already exists. The characters may be fiction, but he writes of them in a way that makes them feel as nonfiction as any of us are.

Paper Towns masterfully addresses the idea of how people see one another. How we imagine the lives of others and what we see of them. There are two parts that were so emotionally and mentally impactful for me that writing a summary of them could never do it justice. Instead, I believe the words of John Green himself are more appropriate.

The first comes at a time when the characters are road tripping to upstate New York and they are imagining the lives of the people in other cars as they speed past them. After two of the characters describe what they imagine a woman's life to be like, Quentin, the main character comes to this realization: "In the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined."

Let that just sink in for a moment.
The way we imagine the lives of others does absolutely nothing to their character, but it--without a doubt--speaks volumes of ours.
Not long after this, Quentin is having a conversation with a girl named Margo and he says this to her:

"Maybe it's more like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like, each of us starts out as a watertight vessel.  And these things happen--these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places. And I mean, yeah, once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable...But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart.  And it's only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out."

Now here I am at 1:00 in the morning, wide awake, thinking about how many people that I really see and how many that I only see ideas of.  I'm sitting here thinking about how many people see me.  It makes me wonder how vulnerable I've let myself be to the people that I say I love the most.  Have I let them see my cracks? Have I let them in enough to see my light, to feel my depth? Or do I let them picture the idea of me? And I realize that it's much more of the latter than I'd ever like to admit.

Here's to letting more people see our cracks.  Here's to using our own cracks to see the cracks of others, and to see them correctly.  I can only imagine how much more rich and fulfilling my life would feel if I let people see my cracks a little more often. So I'm inviting you to do the same.  I'll share my cracks with you if you'll share yours with me.