Well. Here we are again. In this place that’s, for all intents and purposes, absolute rock bottom. Something’s gone wrong, or didn’t go your way, so now you’re sitting idly on a small mountain of broken pieces. What are they pieces of? It’s hard to say. Your life? Your dreams? The internship you lost? The relationship that didn’t work out? The burrito you thought you had wrapped so carefully but exploded out the back the second you took a bite of it? Whatever it is, it’s truly in shambles, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.

So, now that you’re here, what do you do?

Giving up isn’t an option. You invested too much time, too much money, or too much attention, and you know it. What would you even do if you gave up, anyway? There’s just no good way to answer that question.

After licking your wounds and finding yourself in a better state of mind, you start to really notice the pieces that you’re sitting on. What originally seemed hard, jagged, and inhospitable has softened considerably, to the point where you can actually touch it, and so you do, carefully, hesitantly, with so much wariness that your hands are shaking. When you see that the pieces aren’t going to bite, you relax a little. Then you start going through them, slowly. Each one has its own color and texture, but you sort them as best you can until you have many smaller piles instead of one big one. It’s more manageable. It’s almost nice.

But now you’re not sure what to do with them.

You spent all that time making the piles, so you may as well do something, right? It’d be a waste to let them sit there, no matter how many feelings are still attached to them, so you do some thinking, and eventually you start playing around a little. You take some of the pieces from one pile and twist them around. Then you take some from another pile and weave them together. It’s about then that a realization hits you. These pieces you have, they look a lot like scraps of fabric. They look a lot like rags.

You weave more and more pieces together, grabbing different rags from different piles to give your work some variety. There’s something so liberating about this task. The thoughts and feelings you associated with the rags are starting to fade as you get more and more done, and you’re even starting to feel like the thing you’re making is... Beautiful? Kinda shabby, but beautiful.

Before too long, you’re done. The piles, the shards, are gone, and in their place is a new rug that you made yourself. You’re proud of it. You feel a lot better. You think that your rug would look amazing in your living room, so you take it into your hands and start making your way home.

The next day, you look at your rug, and you remember where it came from. You remember all the time you spent sitting on that pile, feeling awful, feeling defeated. It should make you sad, but it doesn’t. Not really. It serves as more of a reminder than anything else, so you smile a little, and you leave the room to go do something else. The rug will always be there, but you have places to go, and there’s no way you’re letting anything stop you from getting there.