To the Person Who Destroyed
Me by Trying to Fix Me
Before I Was Ready
The
way you broke me all over again by trying to ‘fix’ me
is beautifully ironic, I’ll give you that. There is
something almost poetic about the way you turned my damaged heart
into a home for yourself. You see, to you I was a terribly broken
thing. You see, to you I was something that needed fixing. Where
I saw my most precious possession, my heart, perhaps a little
worn for wear but still beautiful to me, you saw a house with
broken shutters made of betrayal and creaking floors made of
mistrust.
I let you convince me that it wasn’t worth your love as it
was, no matter how much love I gave you, it could still be better
because it came from a broken thing like that. I let you regard
my most treasured possession like a thing of disgust because it
had been loved and damaged by someone else before. And what is
worse, I looked at it with disgust too. Like I wasn’t good
enough for you. I handed you the hammer to start smashing.
So you got to work, fixing creaking doors that would never quite
close properly behind people and sweeping away cobwebs from
places I had deliberately buried deep within the chambers. You
roamed through the rooms of my heart and settled down in what you
called a home. A home that was now, you said, worthy of your
love. You stood back and admired the handiwork – my heart
was no longer my own but now, your home.
And for a while, I believed you. And you and I we were happy.
Happy as long as I was doing everything you wanted the way you
wanted it. Happy as long as the quick fixes you had made were
worth your love. Happy as long as I kept a big smile plastered to
my face as you boasted to everyone how much effort it took to fix
me up again, so I was worthy of love again, so I was able to love
again.
As if I was an unlovable thing before you fixed me. As if you had
fallen in love with the idea of me, not the person I am.
The way you fixed me was insidious at best. Ridiculing me into
being comfortable with things before I was ready. Constantly
telling me what ‘normal people’ are like and how I
need to try harder to be like them. Saying you would leave if I
didn’t try harder and harder and harder to be what you
wanted me to be, rather than what I needed to be for myself. I
learned that if I did not put you first, if I spoke of my past,
if I even mentioned pain in any way, shape or form, it would
result in you threatening to leave. The way you would refuse to
love me when I was anxious, when I was in pain, when I needed
love the most because in your mind, it was either perfect, or
nothing at all.
It took me a long time to understand that I was a thing worth
loving, just as I was. It took me a long time to know that my
heart has always been a home, but for no one else, just for me.
It took me even longer to understand that fixing people is not
how you love them. Healing is not made of quick splashes of paint
to cover the sadness, some words to stop the pain from being
quite so painful, and words like ‘I love you’ placed
like a new sofa in an old room hoping to cover up the bloodstains
and heartache on the floor.
Healing is a journey in which one fixes oneself. Slowly.
Carefully. Sometimes with one step forward and two steps back.
Healing is not a horizontal path. It contains cliffs and seas and
mountains and all kinds of things that make it hard to travel. If
it was easy, it would not take time, nor patience to complete.
And to love a broken thing best is to have patience with
it’s journey. It is to hold that person close on the nights
when they wake up screaming. It is to understand that though the
tears are here, they will one day be a distant memory.
Broken people are not houses. You cannot put your feelings inside
them and expect them to be as good as new. Broken people are not
projects for you to fix; instead, allow them fix themselves
whilst you both grow.
The sad thing is, I loved you enough to want to hurry my own
journey, to pretend that you had fixed me, to allow you to let me
think that the damage was gone when really, lurking under the
surface of my newly wallpapered heart, the damage was
resentfully, claustrophobically festering. So one day, I walked
in there and ripped apart all that hard work you did just to let
it breathe.
You see, this is the trouble with broken things like me. You
either love us broken. Or you do not love us at all. I am
grateful that you chose the latter. Because in the absence of
your need to make me perfect, I have learned to love myself just
as I am so much more.
I have learned that my alone is a beautiful, forgiving thing. It
is slowly filling these cracks and wounds inside me with love and
healing. My alone is softer with my heart than your love had ever
left it feeling.