By Dima Ghawi
“Do you see this pure, perfect glass?”
My grandmother’s words echo through her kitchen in Amman, Jordan. I am five years old, and I stare at her—and the vase she holds—with wide eyes.
“A girl is just like this clear glass.” Tata’s own eyes are serious. “If the vase gets cracked for any reason, you can never fix it or glue it back.”
She lifts the vase, tapping the side. “It will always be seen as cracked.” Tata raises an eyebrow. “And who would want a cracked vase?”
Her stern eyes meet mine. “That is the one we throw in the trash.”
This story has been passed down for generations: the glass vase is a girl’s reputation, where any scratch is deemed irreparable. A crack in my vase would destroy my family’s reputation in the community.
My grandmother imparted this story unto me because she believed it to be true, as this same burden of perfection had been placed onto her. But my matrilineage are not the only ones who have grappled with preserving a perfect vase. We all have a vase, regardless of our background, our culture, our identity. Everyone has something in their lives that limits them. The fear of mistakes, the aspiration for perfection, the anxiety of being judged—don’t these worries resonate with us all?
We are taught that to advance, to be loved, we must be perfect. To make even a small mistake is to crack our vase and ruin it in perpetuity.
As individuals and as organizations, we are missing out on expanses of creativity when we uphold these imposed expectations. After all, vases are global. As a coach, I have interacted with individuals across genders, ethnicities, cultures who hold these anxieties. All of us have been conditioned to think we aren’t good enough. All of us feel the confines of a vase.
So, what can we do? How do we question these stories?
I never forgot my grandmother’s words. Her belief came to be my own: a cracked vase was worthless. As I grew up, I internalized that expressing curiosity or voicing my opinion was unacceptable. I accepted my community’s predetermined path for my life: embody perfection, enroll in university to increase my marriageable eligibility, and marry young.
At 19, I got engaged to the most eligible bachelor in our community.
Within a year we married. Shortly after, we moved to San Diego for him to pursue his career. This move thrilled me! In the United States surely I would be allowed to finally grow beyond the vase that had confined me for the first two decades of my life.
Instead, the limitations placed upon me grew. Living in the U.S. marked only a difference in geography, not behavior, and I was my husband’s property—there to serve him and his family, to uphold a picture-perfect, clear-as-glass reputation. Such was the life expected of me. Such was the life I lived.
Until I couldn’t live that life any longer.
I am 25 years old. I am lying on my bed, drowning in depression, when a light flickers within me. This light illuminates and reflects off of the vase that confines me. Don’t I deserve better than this controlling marriage? Am I not worth more than what my husband and community impose onto me?
Can I shatter my vase and leave?
I had a choice: I could keep living to satisfy everyone around me, or I could live for me.
All of us have a choice, and we must choose what will make us rise.
These choices are not easy. I knew that choosing to leave my husband was choosing to shatter my vase. I knew those shards would fly out and scratch me in the process. My husband and his family were outraged. My community whispered shame onto my parents, my siblings.
Worse than that, my own father threatened to have me killed.
The fear of losing myself overshadowed these fears. I had to leave, and in doing so I had to shatter my vase. Importantly, I did not throw away those shards, because I did not abandon my past self to grow. Rather, I embraced my new, shattered state and chose self-transformation.
The choice to shatter our vase is the choice to create something new for the future while still cherishing who we were in the past. With those shards, we can craft who we want to become.
We have been conditioned to see cracks in our vase as mistakes we must hide, but our cracks are what make us different from one another. In turn, our cracks are what make us beautiful. We also need external, collective awareness, one that threads through humanity: we need to see others’ cracks as beautiful! To let ourselves shatter our vases, to recognize the value in our cracks, we must see the value in others’ cracks.
When we choose to shatter our vase and appreciate others’ cracks, not only do we bring knowledge into our lives, but we also teach others through our example. Simultaneously, when we see other people refuse to conform to social limitations, we permit ourselves to do the same.
Representation is inspiration—a ripple effect.
My grandmother was my ripple effect, for she was the one who revealed to me that knowledge is light.
I am five years old, and my grandmother is flipping through a magazine in the kitchen. No women in our family were allowed an education, including Tata, but she still taught herself to read as a girl by studying the shapes and sounds of letters. She read magazines, newspapers, books, anything she could get her hands on, and she planted in me the seed of empowerment—a desire for knowledge.
Tata smiles at me as she rolls up the magazine, tying it with a red ribbon.
“Today, we’re playing a new game,” she says. “We’re celebrating the day you graduate from college!”
At five years old, I am too young to know what “college” was, much less why Tata is so excited about it. All the same, I am entranced by the magazine in her hand.
“I made you a diploma,” she says. “Sit here. When I announce your name, run to me and I’ll hand it to you!”
At five years old, I’m just happy to play a game with my favorite person. I sit down and eagerly wait for her to call my name.
Tata lifts her chin with pride. “Please join me in congratulating our next graduate—Dima Ghawi!”
I dart over to Tata. She leans down to shake my right hand, placing my diploma in the other. Tears well in her brown eyes, and she says, “Congratulations. I am so proud of you.”
In a rejection of graduate decorum, I tackle my grandmother into a hug.
“Remember, Dima,” Tata whispers, hugging me tightly. “Knowledge is light.”
When I left my marriage, when I shattered my vase, I became a source of inspiration to people around me—especially my mother and sister. In witnessing my example, they were encouraged to discover their own voices, to question the vases that had been confining them. All of us have the power to be an agent of change in every life we touch, as my grandmother was for me.
Now, decades later, I often think back to Tata’s graduation game. I grapple with the contradiction that my grandmother instilled in me a desire for knowledge while simultaneously insinuating that my life would be ruined if I did not conform to our community’s standards.
Part of life is living with these contradictions. Part of shattering our vase is refusing to let those contradictions make our choices for us.
Everyone carries a vase within them, no matter who we are or where we’re from or where we go. That means all of us carry our vases to work, too—we bring with us the pressure for perfection, the fear of limitations.
Perhaps the ultimate responsibility of HR professionals is to recognize employees’ vases. We must create a culture of courage where it is safe for people to decide who they want to be. We must create a culture of acceptance where people can bear their cracks without judgment. In this way we return to external awareness: the collective understanding that everyone has cracks, and those cracks are what make us beautiful. HR must empower employees to bring their unique truths to their organization. Because when people feel welcomed, they will stay.
In HR, we have people’s lives—and vases—in our hands, and we must handle them with care. Not so those vases never crack, but so people have the opportunity to shatter their vase. HR can provide the tools, the support, the space, but the choice is theirs to make.
Remember my grandmother’s words: “Knowledge is light.” That’s how we keep breaking vases!