Brokenness Can Be A Bridge

​Last night, I went to see the movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere with my 17-year-old son, Ian. The film tells the story behind Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska, the same year I graduated high school.

Sitting there beside my son, I couldn’t help but notice the collision of timelines: my past and his future, my youth mirrored in the music of a man whose songs have quietly scored the story of my life for decades.

There was something almost spiritual about the experience, watching my son inherit a cultural influence that helped shape me long before he was born. It felt like passing a torch I had no idea I'd one day pass when I first held the baton - awestruck - watching the boss perform for 3 1/2 hours in Cleveland, Ohio in the mid-80s.

What struck me most about the movie wasn’t just the music, it was the pain behind it. Nebraska wasn’t an album Springsteen wanted to write; it was one he had to write. Out of his own darkness - darkness born of a fractured childhood and lifelong depression, he created something raw, unsettling, and true.

As I watched, I saw pieces of myself reflected back on that screen. It frankly made it difficult to watch at times. I saw a man haunted by his past, struggling mightily to enter intimacy and connection, wrestling with ghosts that refused to leave him behind.

I saw the blank-faced isolation of someone who can fill stadiums and still feel desperately unseen.

I wondered, did my son see it too? Did he see and feel the connection between this story he was watching on the screen and the story sitting beside him?

Probably not. How could he? Like most sons his age, he knows fragments of my story - some of the good, the bad, the occasional vulnerability, but not the full arc of how closely my own life has shadowed Springsteen’s.

There would be little reason, really, for the empathy he was surely feeling for that man to reach the man beside him. And in many ways I felt okay with that in the moment.

Springsteen’s struggle was never about fame; it was about survival. He wrote Nebraska as a means of deliverance, a way of giving voice to the darkness that threatened to consume him.

In that way, I understood him completely. Because writing my memoir has felt the same - not something I want to do, but something I have to do. It’s an act of surrender to what’s been buried too long, a way of pulling beauty out of pain, as if that's the sole mission of pain to begin with.

I heard someone say recently that the worst thing we’ve ever done is not bigger than our calling. I’ve been thinking this morning that maybe the worst thing we’ve ever experienced isn’t bigger than our calling either. Our pasts may try to drag us down, but if we’re willing, we can drag them into the future as art, as truth, as connection.

Springsteen’s producers and promoters tried to talk him out of Nebraska. Too dark, too strange, too unlike anything expected of him. But he persisted. He knew this was the work he needed to put into the world.

Watching that persistence stirred something in me - a reminder that some creations are born not out of idea or inspiration or ambition, but out of necessity.

What we create from pain has the power to heal - not just us, but others who see themselves in our stories. That’s the strange redemption of art: it transforms isolation into resonance, sorrow into song, and suffering into togetherness.

Maybe that’s what my son saw last night, even if he wasn't quite old or wise enough to name it; he saw the mysterious way our brokenness can still become a bridge.

A bridge from 1982 to 2025.

A bridge from darkness to light.

A bridge from father to son.

Deliver me from nowhere.

But please, deliver me forward.