The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper

A human being can never treat another person better than he treats himself. Spano’s contract demanded that he act in ways that were dismissive of my attempts to help him. Spano, my ex-husband, my father, my mother, Collin, the hospital administrators, or anyone else. I thought about how I needed to love myself enough to allow others to fulfill their contract with themselves. I wondered why the behavior of this self-hating man would rock me for even a second. I wondered too about my contract with myself.

It is all part of that contract, that even if we didn’t write it for ourselves, we certainly cosigned. When we pick the job that pays us less than we deserve. We do this when we select a partner who confirms our feelings of unworthiness. Like everyone, he had this right of self determination. Spano had honored every word of his inner contract. I do not deserve wellness, so I return to what I deserve.” I do not love myself enough to allow you to take care of me. I do not love myself enough to take care of myself. Because I am afraid, I cannot be here, sober. I cannot endure the pain of facing my life. I am not healthy and cannot commit to healing. What was so terrible to face that death would be preferable? How might his inner contract read that he would be consumed with such a compulsion? I wondered what it must have felt like for him, without the haze of intoxication to blur the relationship between himself and the truth. Spano who, once he’d learned that he wasn’t going to die that afternoon, found the prospect of remaining in the hospital so unsettling that he preferred to hobble out on a bloated, red leg and risk dying a few days later, although he wasn’t yet 30.

The Beauty in Breaking by Michele Harper