written to all the parents of broken children, to those who care but don’t understand, to the people who might let go
how do you explain brokenness. for a tool or toy to be broken is for the object in your hands to no longer be able to perform its purpose. what is my purpose. it might have something to do with constructing meaning, finding happiness, enjoying companionship. for the people who help me stand upright there is a more urgent purpose - for me to stand on my own. it isn’t solely from the desire to stop helping. in a world for people able to stand, to stand on one’s own is the highest good in itself. my purpose then, before all else, must be to stand on my own. if that is my purpose, then i am broken.
even writing this, i feel the need to promise - to plead, really - that i am fixable; i will be able to stand again, so please don’t let go. i know as well as you do that the only reason people keep broken things in their junk drawers and in their garages is because of the allure of fixability. if i am truly broken - un-repairable - if you knew in this moment, as a fact, that i might always need your hands to keep going, what would you do? where would you put me?
you must know that it is unknowable (for me just as much as for you) if i will be able to stand again without help. but you, in so many big and little ways, make it clear that you /need/ to hear it, and i am /so/ scared - scared of being left to die - so i /have/ to pretend for both of us (that i can somehow know that someday in the future i won’t need help anymore). something that i do know more than you is how much pretending costs - how much more it costs to be made to pretend for the person keeping you from the cliff’s edge.
i pretend to know that someday i won’t depend on you - and you pretend that you can understand (or even just believe) that there can be real reasons that someone can’t stand on their own. if you think about it maybe you think of a quadriplegic or someone whose mind leaves them unable to form more than the most simple thoughts. i am sure you don’t think of someone who you would describe as being intelligent and who is able to walk a mile or climb stairs unaided.
people have heard of ptsd. you have, i am sure. when i say ptsd do you think of men in fatigues who came back from a desert where things exploded and people died? have you ever /really/ put in the effort to try to grasp what it must mean that i have diagnosed ptsd from my childhood. the slightly more than a handful of people i have shared a roof with in the years since didn’t treat me much better (sometimes much worse), but by then i was shell shocked enough to start to accept that that is what life would be for me in a way that i never did as a child. you have heard of wounds you can’t see, but you don’t see one on me.
i have my legs and i have my mind. i don’t have hope. it frustrates you - i can tell. you can’t /see/ what’s wrong with me and that confuses you. it confuses you more than you realize. you hear me laugh, see how much the things i create and learn mean to me, and know that i have people in my life who love me. when you witness these things you don’t see me as broken, and you forget that that isn’t what brokenness is to you (but maybe it should be).