Cracked Screens & Cracks in Communication.

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Nov 14, 2024

I’m finding myself tending to life in a backwards manner. Upside down. Can’t seem to find right-side-up.

Planting seeds while fresh April flowers spring to life.

Hibernating in the heat of summer.

Blossoming during autumnal harvesting.

I’ve learned to honor my personal seasonal shifts — seasons that do not reflect the natural cycles of Earth itself, but the landscape of my internal processing.

A very poetic way of saying:

I listen to myself instead of listening to what the world wants of me.

Something I’ve intuitively always done and has only gotten stronger with time.

Am I backward?

Or is the way we move through the world backward?

As I watch myself come out of a summer of isolated hibernation and enter a sprouting of autumnal socialization, it feels like I am re-learning how to engage with others again. I’m also learning — I don’t think we ever knew how to engage with each other from the beginning.

Not in a way that matters. Not in a way I care about.

I care about cracked screens.

Earlier this week, I found myself standing front and center, sharing about my work, THE12, and the foundation of Liberté: creativity, connection, and communication. Locking eyes with a sea of strangers as I spewed seemingly blanketed fluffy words out of my mouth — it’s always a game of Russian Roulette of what I’m going to impulsively say. I question: ‘How do I express the vastness of their meaning in a 60-second pitch?’ Time limits and refined pitches are out of my depth. Colloquialisms and intimate settings are where I’m most comfortable.

I’m more of a ‘let’s talk for an hour while on a walk in nature’ type of woman.

I sometimes wonder if they’re still true — the 3 C’s of Liberté — as I watch Liberté ripple, wave, and crash, just like the sea itself. I find it extremely difficult to articulate the core of my work — the 3 C’s — as I (and Liberté) deepen and deepen into more spiritually connected practices.

I think there’s something missing.

That something is curiosity.

While standing in the room — now listening to other entrepreneurs pitch their projects — I caught a glimpse of the woman next to me. My attention span can barely last 60 seconds and my eyes tend to wander. What grabbed my attention was her phone screen. It was cracked. Shattered. Imperfect. And it soon became all I could think about.

I internally questioned:

How did it happen?

How did she handle it? Did she shrug it off? Make a big deal?

Where was she?

Does she want to get it fixed?

Or is it a reminder that all things break and splinter? Nothing is finite.

Fractures of nature. Cracks. Breaks. In Between Foundations.

*Shared with pride, not embarrassment*:

I have cracked every single phone screen I have ever owned. I break things often. I’m clumsy, careless, and prone to ‘accidents’ — sometimes life itself will take a perfectly good screen and drop it on the ground. There’s always a story behind a cracked screen. My most recent story involved lost luggage, shopping malls, racing the clock, and phones that ended up on the ground and not safely in a jacket pocket.

These are the stories I care about.

Imperfect moments. Real-life moments. Shattered moments. Fragile moments.

I want to hear more moments about cracked screens. The story inside the story. The fracture of life — the breaking, mending, and putting back together.

All other conversations become fluff. Filler. Uninteresting. Boring. Yet, it’s what so many people lead with. The traditional — how are you, where you’re from, what you do for a living, what you’re building in business (at least give me the ‘why’ behind the reason you’re creating something) — I’d rather slam a perfectly good phone on the ground than answer these lame questions over and over and over again. Has communication always been this pristine and robotic?

The cracks are so much more interesting to me.

The cracks are the entryway to depth.

The cracks are the entryway to truth.

Curiously questioning:

‘How do we invite more cracks into conversations?’

The fissures. The imperfections.

Truth.

I’d rather bypass the layers and layers of perfected communication. Pleasantries. Saying the ‘right thing’. Yawn. I’m just so bored by it all. My time is wasted because of it. Give me something substantial. Give an interesting story. Let me into who you are.

Our conversations deserve to be cracked open, just like our hearts. Much like phone screens, they’re not indestructible. Fragile…yes. Perfect…no.

Everything that breaks deserves to be heard. That’s actually what makes cracked screens perfect — they allow themselves to crack, to begin with.