For decades, I believed I was broken—not metaphorically, but fundamentally. Here, I trace how that belief embedded itself and what began to unravel when I tugged on the string.
I am broken.
It’s a stark, radioactive observation—bleak honesty held up to the light. I coerced the words out of hiding, forced them to be seen, illuminated. I wanted to show what I’d found. Look. Here it is. Discovered. Rediscovered.
For a long time, that sentence felt like truth. Not metaphor. Not exaggeration.
Diagnosis.
But now I’m not so sure.
The story I learned to tell about myself
Like unearthing the foundation stones of my own life, I brushed off the time-pressed supports to bear witness—to admit that I grew into a malformed concrete statue, poured crooked, back bent in permanence. Is it courageous to say it so plainly, or arrogant?
Maybe it isn’t brokenness.
Perhaps it’s archaeology.
The wood beam doesn’t split itself. The window doesn’t crack its own panes. The child—this human-shaped hypothesis I once was—did not arrive defective. Destruction isn’t required for art, and damage isn’t proof of origin.
Maybe it isn’t brokenness. Perhaps it’s archeology.
Physics calls it external stress. Biology calls it environmental pressure. Storytellers call it an inherited wound. In every case, the fault lies not in the object, but in the forces acting upon it.
When survival becomes identity
I learned to see myself as collateral damage in a story I never volunteered to be part of. The wrong story.
That kind of narrative embeds itself like shrapnel. It speaks with violence, heated, fast, tearing through soft tissue on both entry and exit. Eventually, the voice of the environment begins to masquerade as the voice of the self. What was said to you becomes what you say about yourself.
So was this inherent ruin? Was it present from first contact, traveling through sperm, single-minded evolution? Or is it simply the impact pattern left by growing up in a space that failed to shelter its young?
Blood spatter blooming across an angel-white canvas.
I wasn’t sheltered. I was the shelter.
I was the riot shield.
Why “broken” felt like the truth
Psychologists cushion it, call it developmental imprinting from chronic invalidation. Softness in technobabble.
The soft grey clay of me was nicked, it grew into its grooves—corrected, dismissed, reshaped by hands that didn’t know what they were holding.
Poets call it a family heirloom. A curse passed down by parents too young, too overwhelmed, too unfinished themselves.
Eventually, the voice of the environment begins to masquerade as the voice of the self.
For years, I felt like both the container and the containment unit for my parents’ unprocessed history. I held it all, compressing its malignancy into coal, shaping a fuel that burns hot and dirty.
But even malignant things can be studied. Mapped. Understood.
Learning to tell a different story
I’m allowed to question my story.
I’m allowed to revise it.
I don’t need permission.
My narrator was unreliable, feeding me words that never fit, syllables stiff and foreign in my mouth. I’m allowed to inhabit my own life as someone who exists for more than filling the quiet gaps in someone else’s chaos.
The protagonist eventually discovers the monster isn’t a monster at all—just the byproduct of the wrong experiment—a side effect of the treatment, not the disease.
Echoes aren’t predictions.
They’re leftovers.
A Closing Invitation
Have you ever believed you were broken? Consider this a gentle permissive nudge to question that story. Some identities are scars that we mistake for origin stories. Some damage is real, but the meaning we assign to it is not immutable.
