The cracks that define us: Charles Assisi looks back on 2025

Life rarely falls into neat columns. Fragments remain out of place. But we don’t need to be unbroken to live well. We just need to learn to carry the pieces.

If there is one truth I’ve had to face this year, it is this: I am broken.

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942). There is no changing the solitary nature of our journey. (Wikimedia)

This is not a conclusion arrived at dramatically. It came slowly, over too many hours spent in a coffee shop not far from home. The kind of place that is plush and a little pretentious; built for Work-From-Anywhere types. I don’t work there. I sit. I watch. A lifetime in journalism makes that an easy thing to do.

What struck me first were the regulars. They don’t just enter; they arrive, with the easy swagger of people who believe a place belongs to them. They greet the baristas like they are old friends, though nothing else about their interactions suggests familiarity, closeness or warmth. They look around in the manner of people checking if the room still matches their memory of it. Then they settle into a favourite chair that almost always appear unoccupied, with the authority of people who helped choose the furniture.

The longer I watched, the more I noticed their performances slip.

The man in the sharp suit, for instance. Everything about him signals success, until one sees his jaw tighten every time his phone lights up. Then there is the older man who always arrives with a much younger woman. He has a laugh that lands loudly. Her smile appears to be fraying at the edges. You don’t need a press card to see that something is off-balance.

The couple by the window, on good days, they look inseparable. On other days, they look like they’re rehearsing a goodbye. He checks his phone incessantly. She looks away too quickly. It seems like something is cracking beneath the surface.

It took me an unreasonably long time to recognise that the smooth suaveness of each was mere performance. None of them truly “belongs”, and I suspect this might be true even in the quiet of their homes. It is hard to stop performing, once it has become a habit. Hard to stop reaching for that something one can’t quite name.

What truly hurt, as I watched these broken people fighting to keep it together, was the realisation that I was doing the same. People-watching was my escape.

I began to examine my own fractures with the same scrutiny I had turned on them. What steadies me? What derails me? What stops me in my tracks?

Was the stoic silence I had been trying to inculcate all year, supposedly as a kind of composure, merely a shield for things I am unwilling to acknowledge?

Where did the restlessness come from, that led me to experiment with routines of all kinds: Waking up earlier; sleeping less; writing more; writing less; working out harder? Weren’t these small acts of control just a way to distract from the many things over which I have no power?

Still, the attempts mattered, I told myself. They revealed something about the way I hold myself together and the ways I come undone.

All this is not to say that joy was absent. It has turned up in a myriad unexpected places: in a message sent by a friend I’d drifted away from; in a perfectly made omelette (three egg whites and one yolk); in a line from a book that felt like it found me at the exact second I needed it. Then, of course, on other days, joy refused to appear, no matter how politely I asked.

Watching the regulars in that café, it became clear that everyone was doing the same dance: Trying awkwardly, inconsistently and imperfectly, to negotiate their own brokenness; all the while hoping that joy would eventually arrive.

I have realised, sitting in that room, that brokenness isn’t something to fix. It’s something to learn to live with. Adjust to. Build boundaries around. Because life rarely falls into neat, even columns, and rarely looks like you’d imagined.

I will return to the coffee shop, sit in my usual corner and watch the other regulars take their places. I will watch first-timers construct their perfect masks. And I’ll keep learning from strangers who don’t know they’re teaching me anything.

Because paying attention has taught me something quietly radical: We don’t need to be unbroken to live well. We just need to live well while carrying the pieces.

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)