Rebuilding Broken

By MD Shoatzycoatl

There comes a point in life when our soul hangs in the balance – saddened, desperate, and foreign to the person we’ve become. The life we once romanticized seems shattered and we’re left wondering what to do. Rebuilding Broken traces the author’s difficult journey from complete ruin and painful realization to a state of fulfillment and salvation. Along the way, MD emphasizes the power of spirituality outside the structure of organized religion as well as the importance of rediscovering the soul in a world which defines us, breaks us, and defines us again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312383722

Book preview

Rebuilding Broken

REBUILDING BROKEN

MD Shoatzycoatl

Copyright © 2013 by MD Shoatzycoatl

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-312-38372-2

Cover photos taken by Fabio Venni

Other photography provided by Chelsea Marie Photography

Quote

When you’re on a journey, and the end keeps getting further and further away, then you realize that the real end is the journey [itself].

~ Karlfried Graf Durckheim

Acknowledgements

To the Western Meadowlark, a specimen that does not breed well with others, feeds in a flock, and devours the seeds of new life. Warble, Neglecta, warble away!

GROUND ZERO

Chapter 0

Raw carnage and reality

A few years before the publishing of this book, I held a knife to my throat. It’s cold, serrated edge pressed firmly against the artery in the left side of my neck. The life I had been building for close to ten years had been reduced to a wasteland of burning embers wrought with jealousy, lies, and a lack of compassion. I was but a shell of my former self, standing amongst the raw carnage my soul had endured for so long. But how did I get there? Surely it wasn’t always so bad… 

Raw carnage is the outcome of ignorance. Whether on a personal, individual level, or applied to the societal, global blanket under which humanity continues to fail.

For some, raw carnage is simple. It’s a failed class, a crush that dumps you unexpectedly, or waking up to find the family pet lifeless. It’s a rainstorm that dampens a week or a month. It’s a snowfall that makes things cold for awhile. But the storm will pass and the snow will melt, leaving rainbows and bringing new life in their wake.

For others, raw carnage is something a bit more complex. It’s having your child murdered. It’s receiving a phone call telling you that your significant other has been involved in an accident in which they will never be coming back. It’s a paralyzing hit in football, a tornado, a school shooting, a hurricane, or two towers of black smoke in the middle of a booming metropolis. For others, raw carnage is something which completely shapes who they are and who they will become. For better or worse, raw carnage is Ground Zero.

For myself, the realization that I stood at my Ground Zero came when my ex-fiancé confessed that she had been involved in several other serious multi-month affairs through the course of our nine-plus year relationship. Such sobering news brought deterioration and plague to the world I had built to be solid and stable. Everything I had thought I knew – everything I had thought I felt – crumbled around me and fell in an instant amongst pillars of emotional flame.

Although spirituality had no role in her life, my former fiancé had claimed to have been touched by God on that fateful evening. The Lord allegedly informed her that she was supposed to have many different lovers and that I was supposed to become her business partner and fund her elaborate restaurant one day. 

Such words burned and her actions left deep wounds which would only ever heal into ugly scars should I choose to continue in the world of the living.  

A pastor and mentor of mine once told me that oftentimes our journey on this Earth comes down to one or two life-altering crossroads, and it’s the choices that we make during these moments that will come to define who we are supposed to be for the rest of our lives.

When we come to our Ground Zero, do we choose to lie down in despair and live out our existence amongst the rubble of yesteryear? Or do we look to clean up and rebuild something entirely new?

In his brilliant book and television interview series titled The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell claims that ‘one can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as a contrary to life but as an aspect of life.’ (PoM; 188)

I lowered the knife from my throat, realizing the toll, the disease that carnage had played over time. I realized the role of my own ignorance and more importantly, I realized the death of a relationship that had, in truth, been decayed and rotten for well over the majority of its duration. I had come to the realization that I was at a life-altering crossroad.

The events that followed would in fact solidify my standing at Ground Zero – something that I had been turning away from time and time again despite what everyone around me had been witnessing and telling me for years.

My ex-fiancé began to cry and confess how badly she felt that she had ruined my life and how terrible of a person she was for doing the things that she had. Her emotions began to escalate, leading her to the point where she didn’t believe she deserved to live anymore, followed by a plea to take her life with the knife in my hand if I wasn’t going to take my own.

Of course nobody needed to lose their life and after conveying this to her and suggesting that I go to my father’s for the night, she began screaming about how she was going to kill herself if I wouldn’t do it for her. I asked her to calm down and we could figure out a plan moving forward with how the separation should go. She then got up and said she was going to take her own life and there was nothing I could do to stop it. She began to run, and instinctually, I got in her way and she began hitting me. I physically restrained her until she finally calmed down. Police were called and after a review of the situation, and despite her wishes, I was arrested and charged with domestic violence for ‘using physical force to impede her progress’.

I was handcuffed, driven to the jail, strip-searched, and put into a cell with a confessed first-degree murderer in transit and a child molester. I had never been arrested in my life and so many people had always looked up to me. I was a loyal, trustworthy, loving friend, brother, uncle, son, teacher, and role model. What would everybody think when they found out that I was arrested? Would I ever find another job as a teacher again? Who would turn their back on me, and who would still be there for me when I got out of jail? My long-term relationship, my image, my spirit, my job, my life were all in ruin. I may have been in denial for years, but laying there afraid to fall asleep that summer night in jail, I could no longer deny my own Ground Zero that had been festering and rotting on its own for so many years.

In Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, he writes and cites: ‘One disease, long life; no disease, short life. In other words, those who know what’s wrong with them and take care of themselves accordingly will tend to live a lot longer than those who consider themselves perfectly healthy and neglect their weaknesses.’ (ToP; 48) We, as people, live most of our lives in denial and ignorance, letting small tensions and unpleasant decay transform into the kind of raw carnage that eventually destroys us. Hoff continues to say that ‘the wise know their limitations; the foolish do not.’ (ToP; 43) Many of us don’t know where to draw the line in the sand versus turning the other cheek when it comes to our own happiness and our own standards and expectations in life.

The unfortunate reality is that most – if not all – of us will have to experience this concept of Ground Zero at some point in our lives to become whole. No matter how you were raised or where you grew up, every single one of us experiences being broken and fractured to the very core of who we are as human beings. But in order to avoid being broken over and over again, we need to stop living in ignorance. We have to be able to realize and accept our own Ground Zero before we can begin to rebuild our own broken.

Chapter 1

The Angel of Death

‘There is a Muslim saying about the Angel of Death: When the Angel of Death approaches, he is terrible. When he reaches you, it is bliss.’ (PoM; 279)

Perhaps the Angel of Death finally caught up to me as I laid on my hard, pillowless cot in the dreary city jail. As I was being booked, a city official notified me that a restraining order would be put in place and I would not be allowed to go back to the life I once had without breaking the law. It was over. Many figurative deaths took place that night, and it was terrifying at first, but oddly enough, when the whirlwind of destruction settled down and my cards had been dealt, I breathed in a sigh of relief and put myself at peace. As the Angel of Death’s hand rest on my shoulder, I noticed that a previous prisoner had etched the following in the top bunk bed above me: ‘This is not the end.’

In another one of Joseph Campbell’s magnificent pieces of work, he challenges his audience by asking: ‘If [you] were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything [you] loved and thought [you] lived for were devastated, what would [you] live for?’ (PtB; 88) Campbell goes on to say: ‘I’ve known religious people who have had such experiences. They would say, It is God’s will. For them, faith would work. Now, what do you have in your life that would play this role for you? What is the great thing for which you would sacrifice your life? What makes you do what you do; what is the call of your life to you?’ (PtB; 88)

It is in our moments of brokenness that we must decide which shattered pieces to hang on to and which pieces shall forever remain fragmented. This is a difficult process for people when they are in such a low and vulnerable state. They usually become quite impressionable and desperate to escape the Angel of Death’s grasp however they can. Oftentimes, they begin rebuilding something with the wrong pieces, creating a life destined to be broken again and again in the future.

Not long ago, I had a friend who was living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck. He was a kindhearted soul who loved to talk and talk. As a matter-of-fact, let’s just call him ‘Mighty Mouth’ for this reason.

Living with him in the bayou were two alcoholic drug-dealing friends. When the storm hit, Mighty Mouth’s house and possessions were destroyed. One of his two friends went missing and the other remained attached like an old, stench-filled barnacle.

From there, Mighty Mouth moved to Colorado, following an opportunity to earn some money taking care of an elderly woman in her home. The alcoholic, drug-dealing friend followed and Mighty Mouth remained associated with him.

It was during this time in his life that Mighty Mouth and I became friends, hanging out in his driveway and sharing details of our storied journeys. He reflected on the flood that washed his old life away and his dealings with the Angel of Death. He spoke of being terrified and losing the life he had become accustom to, but in hindsight, he realized the silver lining – the blessing – that beginning over had offered him.

But something was never right with Mighty Mouth. No matter how many times I hung out with him, and despite his seemingly rejuvenated approach to life – his smile, his laughing, his desire to talk about how great everything suddenly was – it felt as though he still lived in the shadow of something dark and grave…something he truly hadn’t escaped from his own Ground Zero amidst the waters of Hurricane Katrina.

One late summer afternoon, Mighty Mouth showed up at my door in a state of despair. The elderly woman in his care had decided to kick him out and informed him that his services were no longer needed.  

I asked Mighty Mouth what had happened and he told me that he had gotten back into the drug scene with the old stench-filled barnacle whom he had allowed to follow him up to Colorado. Mighty Mouth was trying to earn some extra cash on the side and the elderly woman found out that he was conducting criminal operations out of her basement.

The moral of the story is that Mighty Mouth decided (albeit from his kind heart) to hold onto a negative piece of his past during the process of rebuilding. He held onto an aspect of his past that kept him in the raw carnage of his previous Ground Zero, the new life he was building being condemned to brokenness when the Angel of Death inevitably decided to approach once again.

So how are we – in our brokenness – supposed to avoid just that? Where do we start and how are we supposed to figure out what to hang on to and what to get rid of in order to keep the Angel of Death from haunting us and breaking us over and over again? 

When I got out of my one-night stay in jail, I knew that I couldn’t move forward by myself and sought the support of a man whom I had previously gone to for advice when dealing with difficult emotions and thoughts. For the sake of this book, I’ll be referring to him as ‘TS’, or The Shelter because of his ability to shield me from the confusing turmoil in my soul for at least an hour a day.

Six months before my arrest for domestic violence, I chose TS to be my therapist. My ex-fiancé and I had sailed into the roughest waters we had ever been (so-to-speak), and I made the decision to seek a professional’s help in assisting me down the path of exiting acquaintances with my significant other.

My idea was to slowly wean myself out of the relationship by the end of my former fiancé and I’s lease (seven months later). TS was quick to tell me how foolish of an endeavor this would be. He told me that it was silly to spend my money on therapy while still in the relationship because nobody – not even myself – could help me move forward while still embedded in my own rotting carnage. Naturally, this made me think: ‘Well, who the hell is this guy? Screw him…I’m smart, I’ll figure it out myself.’

Of course he needn’t rub it in my face six months later, but it was a valuable lesson. Too many people (and especially young people) in our self-centered and individualistic culture think they can handle difficult situations by themselves when in reality, the majority of the time they tend to make it worse. It’s almost as if we’ve been conditioned by our society to feel embarrassed to seek help from others. As if it is a sign of weakness. And we’ve become so fearful of being embarrassed that we let our Ground Zeroes grow and grow until the rot and unhappiness become so great and our broken nature can no longer be ignored.

TS wasn’t surprised to receive a phone call from me after being arrested, and upon starting up therapy again, I told him that I was ready to listen – that I no longer wanted to live in the shadow of the Angel of Death. I wanted to figure out what I needed to leave behind regardless of how difficult it might be.

Chapter 2

Faith, Chance, and Bologna Sandwiches

‘Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.’ (PoM; 202)

These are the words of Joseph Campbell in an interview series with journalist Bill Moyers. Not satisfied with such a seemingly careless and simple suggestion, Moyers goes on to challenge Campbell in the following dialogue:

MOYERS: But what about chance? A drunken driver turns the corner and hits you? That isn’t your fault. You haven’t done that to yourself.

CAMPBELL: From that point of view, is there anything in your life that did not occur as by chance? This is a matter of being able to accept chance. The ultimate backing of life is chance – the chance that your parents met, for example! Chance, or what might seem to be chance, is the means through which life is realized. The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises. Another war has been declared somewhere, and you are drafted into an army, and there go five or six years of your life with a whole new set of chance events. The best advice is to take it all as if it had been of your intention – with that, you evoke the participation of your will. (PoM; 202-203)

Upon first reading Campbell’s perspective of chance and acceptance, I was offended and angry. What a lackluster explanation for all of those who have been tragically widowed or lost loved ones in the events that took place September 11th, 2001. What a heartless bit of advice for those who get diagnosed with cancer or get raped in a dark alleyway. Are we supposed to just accept these moments in our life in which we are broken ‘as if [they] had been of [our own] intention’?

But that’s not exactly Campbell’s point upon further reflection. His words seem built on the assumption that people are conditioned to seek an explanation for the tragedies they experience. They need to have an answer for why they are at Ground Zero and what caused it. When they can’t find an answer (or even when they feel they have found an answer), their frustration is more easily directed towards others.

Campbell advises that we not get stuck on blaming or explaining, but focus on handling where we are in the moment as it pertains to building a positive future.

In the previous chapter, I quoted Campbell as suggesting that ‘faith’ functions in moving people with religious backgrounds forward in the face of tragic situations. But there’s something more here. These ideas of ‘faith’ and ‘chance’ seem at odds with one another when trying to explain the unexplainable, and one needs to understand the difference between the two and how they apply to individual worldview before beginning the process of rebuilding.

I’m sure you’ve been asked the question: ‘Do you believe everything happens for a reason?’ at some point in your life. Take a second to think about how you would answer this question right now, and why you would answer it the way you have.

Your findings may tell some great truths about who you are at your foundation and how your experiences (or lack thereof) dealing with the realization of Ground Zero have shaped you – where you’ve built your current worldview from and how you are likely to interpret future events.

Your findings will also speak volumes to your personal feelings regarding the concepts of ‘faith’ and ‘chance’.

When you stand in your own personal carnage and Ground Zero landscape, you are faced with many choices – choices that will determine whether or not you will be destined to revisit Ground Zero again in your future. ‘Faith’ and ‘chance’ are the characters that will drive your story from this point forward. One of them is to be the protagonist, and the other the antagonist.

For my father, he’s faced Ground Zero at least twice in his life and perhaps he’s got another trip there planned in his future. He’s a chance guy, plain and simple. There’s no predetermined path or greater intervention at work. It’s a bunch of Bologna Sandwiches to him.

The first time he faced Ground Zero was when he was but a child – not even to the double-digits in age yet. His father and most important role model (my grandfather) was electrocuted to death. It devastated him – as it would any child in those circumstances and ever since that day, my father remains convinced that there couldn’t possibly be a God because if there was, He wouldn’t let a good man like my Grandpa Stanley die that day. It was chance, it had to be chance. Faith would be forever broken to my father.

My Dad’s past brings up a good question – a question that many search long and hard for an answer to and never find a single thing. As a result, many people become discouraged and give up their faith. The question being: ‘If God existed, why would He let bad things happen to good people?’

Now let’s step aside for a moment and just fess up to something. We all make mistakes and we all know that we make mistakes, that shouldn’t be a revelation to any