Broken Things Don’t Need Fixing Either

They think he takes the sunrise for granted. He's seen it too many times before.

He has, that's true, but he saw it when his eyes flickered open and he found himself on the floor, body thumping the aching aftereffects of an overdose.

The shelf-stockers at Safeway laugh a little when she comes every week and spends fifteen minutes pacing the freezer section before loading a basket with Marie Callender's.

And she hears them, thin hairs pinched between the goosebumps forming on her arms and blood rushing up her neck. They don't know she'd forced herself ten pounds below healthy last December. No one mentioned recovery came with binges. She shimmies down to check-out in her size M leggings.

Despite enviable grades, he finishes last on every exam, time limits burning at his heels as he sits alone in huge lecture halls and scribbles like mad. The prof arches a brow when he hands in the test and his classmates stare when he comes late to class.

They don't know that OCD exceeds "germaphobia" and folding things into perfect halves. They wouldn't believe it if he said he had compulsions for breathing, blinking, and walking. They'd laugh if they knew he checked all the outlets, the windows, and the stove before leaving the house.

We're all broken. The children think lack of Wi-Fi ruins the world. The high-schoolers try to believe everything's fine, while their classmates gouge holes into themselves and tear hair from their scalps. The college kids know everything's gone to shit and they fade, skimming existence, wading through party scenes and orgies. The adults cover it up well, working full-time and dancing with alcohol, their audience the bleating of daytime Soaps.

We can't always see it--the depression, the eating disorders, the anxiety, the addiction--but damned if it's not there. Maybe it doesn't make sense--he's too happy, too thin/fat, too successful, too on top of his shit--but being broken isn't supposed to make sense. People shouldn't crack, lives shouldn't twist, being born shouldn't be a crime, being human shouldn't mean pain. But we live in a world where they do, it is, and it does.

We'd all like to think everyone else has their life under control. We've constructed a stigma around "broken things". After all, who wants to be broken? We spend our lives sprinting in the opposite direction, trying to get further and further from a broken truth.

But we're all living, breathing examples of broken things and living, breathing examples that broken doesn't mean bad; broken doesn't always need fixing.