The Beauty in Breaking

I was captured from the first page. Michele Harper survived a childhood in a battered home, despite her upper class background, and became an ER doctor. She poetically writes of her life, her thoughts, her deep sense of self and her life of service. Most of the chapters are of ER patients who she brings to life and connects with. They know that she ses them and respects them and wants the best for them, as she does for herself. A truly outstanding story of hope.

“Brokenness can be a remarkable gift. If we allow it, it can expand our space to transform - this potential space that is slight, humble, and unassuming. It may seem counterintuitive to claim the benefits of having been broken, but it is precisely when cracks appear in the bedrock of what we thought we knew that the gravity of what has fallen away becomes evident. When that bedrock is blown up by illness, a death, a breakup, a breakdown of any kind, we get the chance to look beyond the rubble to see a whole new way of life. The landscape that had been previously obscured by the towers of what we thought we knew for sure is suddenly revealed, showing us the limitations of the way things used to be.”

The Beauty in Breaking is Michele Harper's story of the growth she found in stepping away from the broken places in her life and starting again. Harper has experienced much brokenness, from an abusive father, to working as a strong black woman in a profession as an emergency room physician dominated by white men, to the loss of her marriage.

The stories she tells from her work in the emergency room are captivating, and they, too, support her ideas of the importance of stepping forward, away from the ruins, into great beauty.

“This devastation is a crossroads with a choice; to remain in the ashes or to forge ahead unburdened. Here is the chance to mold into a new nakedness, strengthened by the legacy of resilience to climb over the debris toward a different life.”

Dr. Harper is a beautiful writer, and her stories really sucked me in. And I suppose I should be a little bit surprised I liked this so much, because I am a hypochondriac and I usually try to avoid medical stuff like it's the plague COVID?? Sometimes in her analyses after the fact, applying the things she learned from her patients to her own life, it came off a little self-righteous, but I still think she did a great job of weaving her own story of her own healing from an abusive childhood through her work in various emergency rooms. 3.5 stars.

TW: infant death, evidence of child abuse, discussions of rape