dis.in.te.grate
/dis’in(t)ə,grat/
verb
break up into small parts, typically as the result of impact or decay
Anyone else feel the impact and/or decay of the year 2020? Please tell me I’m not alone in feeling like all of my insides and outsides, my mind and my soul have been broken up into small parts as a result of the ginormous collision of all the worlds’ ills within a mere 12 months.
It's been a year. A year that’s inspired pretty snowflake Christmas ornaments laced with the f-bomb. We all know the global events that have inspired these dainty baubles, so no need for me to list them out here, but without exaggeration we can claim to have lived through a year that has quite literally, and I do mean the literal definition of literally, brought every social scourge to the surface. It’s been a year when all the -isms have refused to stay quietly obscured and have demanded we take a position to act or not act while looking them straight in the eye. A year when every U.S. institution has been ripped open to show the skeletons desperate to remain hidden in the closets. Oh, and there’s been this crazy new disease spreading around the world, too.
One would think that life would take pity on us all and eliminate all the typical sufferings of being human, but nope. People are still being diagnosed with cancer. Babies are being miscarried. Psychotic breaks are still happening. Personally, I’ve seen my entire daily life disintegrate over the past 12 months. Pending divorce. Moving my business. Restructuring my business. Appliances and cars dying. Revisiting past traumas. Avoiding writing and podcasting. My entire worldview disintegrated.
It's been a heavy year. It’s been a dark year. It’s been a painfully good year.
In 1964, polish psychologist, Kasimierz Dabrowski, published his theory of positive disintegration. Essentially, he posited that in order for advancement and development and growth to occur, a person first needs to go through a phase of disintegration. Everything that person believes and understands needs to be broken into small parts in order for it to be rebuilt and addended to create a higher sense of the world, of the individual, and of the individual’s place in the world. Before we can grow, we must first fall apart.
This has been a new theory for psychology, not such a new concept for philosophy and religion and nature. The birthing of a butterfly requires the disintegration of the caterpillar. The birthing of a plant requires the disintegration of the seed. Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12.24). Gautama Buddha said, “Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again.”
The first steps of healing a wound, physical or otherwise, is to debride it. To clean out the infected tissues, beliefs, behaviors. This is painful, but without debridement, new and healthy tissue and mindsets cannot grow and therefore wounds cannot heal.
2020 has been painful. All that we have known has been disintegrating before our eyes. And it has been necessary. In the midst of the pain and discomfort, we must remember that we are positively disintegrating. We have to let our former ways fall apart, so in the rubble we can find the pieces we want to hold on to and rebuild something more beautiful, more enlightened, more well.
No one knows when this time will come, but there will be a time when we will stop disintegrating and begin to reintegrate. There will be a time when our collective trauma ceases and we will be left to collectively create new meaning. This is a time of hope. This is a time of required collapse and exciting opportunity.
Yes, 2020 has disintegrated into a shiny f-bomb ornament inspiring monstrosity. Thank f*%# for that.
I am grateful to be rejoining my online friends and colleagues in Hoagies’ Gifted BlogHops. Check out their interpretations of 2020 here.