Broken Crayons Still Color – It’s Never Over

There is a saying I keep coming back to: broken crayons still color.

Six words. That’s all it is. But every time I sit with it, something in me exhales. Because if I’m being honest, there are seasons where I have felt exactly like that. Snapped in half. Worn down to the paper. Tossed back in the box with the ones nobody reaches for first.

And still. Still coloring.

The places that have tried to break me

Some of my cracks come from the work. I have spent years advocating — for my team, for fair pay, for accurate accountability, for the people whose unseen work keeps things moving. Advocacy is holy work, but it costs you. You write the proposal. Build the deck. You send the email up the chain that you know is going to ruffle feathers, because somebody has to say the quiet thing out loud. And sometimes the answer is silence. At times the answer is blame pointed back at you. Sometimes you walk in whole and walk out chipped.

I won’t pretend that doesn’t leave a mark. It does. There are days I wonder if I am too much, too direct, too willing to push back. There are days I wonder if I am not enough — not senior enough, not heard enough, not yet where I am supposed to be. Both can be true in the same hour.

Other cracks are older and quieter. They come from being authentically myself in spaces that subtly ask you to shrink. From standing up to bullies and being told I was the problem for naming it. From the slow erosion of being repeatedly underestimated. Those breaks don’t bleed loudly. They just leave you wondering, in your most tired moments, whether the version of you still becoming is even worth becoming.

What the broken crayon knows

Here’s what I have learned, slowly, and mostly the hard way: a broken crayon doesn’t lose its color. The pigment is the same. The wax is the same. Things that made it useful in the first place are still inside it. The break doesn’t subtract the gift. It just changes the grip.

I am still growing. Wanting to say that plainly, because we are taught to perform arrival — to act like we have figured it out, like we are the unbroken crayon at the front of the box. I’m not. I am mid-becoming. Learning how to advocate without absorbing every battle into my body. I am learning how to lead and speak and stand without apologizing for the space I take up. I’m learning that being tired is not the same as being finished.

And in the middle of all that — I am still useful. Still creating. Still ordering my steps, even when the path feels uneven. The proposals still get written. The team still gets defended. Blog still gets posted. The faith still gets practiced. Not because I am whole, but because wholeness was never the prerequisite. Willingness was.

If you are reading this in your own broken season

Maybe you are the coworker who keeps getting passed over. Or you are the leader carrying weight nobody sees. Maybe you are the person who spoke up and is still waiting on the room to catch up to what you said. Maybe you are simply tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.

Hear me: the break is not the verdict. The break is the evidence that you have been used. That you have shown up. That you have been pressed against real surfaces and made real marks. Crayons that never get used stay perfect. They also stay pointless.

I would rather be the broken one in someone’s hand than the whole one in the back of the box.

Coloring anyway

So this is where I am. Cracked in places. Worn down in others. Still figuring out which version of myself I am walking into next. Surrendering the parts I cannot fix to a God who has never once flinched at my brokenness. Still believing that the work I am doing — the advocacy, the writing, the leading, the becoming — is leaving color on the page even when I cannot see the picture yet.

Broken crayons still color. Seemingly broken people still create. Broken leaders still build. Broken faith still moves mountains, sometimes one trembling inch at a time.

If you are broken today, you are not disqualified. You are just being held differently. Pick yourself up. Press yourself to the page. Make the mark only you can make.