The Lasting Stages of Being Broken

The hardest truth that I’ve ever had to accept is that I cannot be fixed, so I am broken. I do not feel broken, I can think and laugh and love like anyone else. I can try new things and be the better person. I do what I can to make everyone feel welcome and invited and even cared for, but there has not been a person I have met that can do the same for me.

How am I to be happy when I can fake a smile better than keep one? When can I feel the same joy that I give to others?

I’m broken and the feeling has never felt so unnerving.

When fun becomes a task, tasks become a routine, and that routine sucks the life out of you, you are broken. But there are varying degrees of being broken.

Some people you can tell are barely being held together by anything sustainable, those who constantly complain to a degree where their personality comes off as bitchy and unfriendly not because they are but because that’s all that they’ve become. Those people are broken, of course, on one of the deepest stages of the spectrum.

However, you can still function while being broken, because to be broken means that not all of your personality and abilities have to shut down but at least one does. One missing piece. To be broken is to be a puzzle so close to being completed with only one remaining piece that lingers out of sight. Some people are missing more of their pieces than others.

This concept can be hard to understand until lived through, but the pain that being broken inflicts is real and it is damaging. No matter how well off you are, it seems we are all looking for our last piece. We are all broken, some more lost than others. I am broken, yet my picture and my poise carry through a dashing array of joy.

I am not happy. Maybe none of us are truly happy and we as a people only get so close to what happiness really is.

To love, to hate, to enjoy and displease, to feel all those feelings about oneself; when the puzzle comes time to be completed, how many less pieces will there be this time?