handle with care

Once upon a time I thought people were invincible. I just assumed that this was how people were, and I took it for granted - it was so true that I never questioned it. This was a time of innocence and self-belief, that people had to be a total of more than who they were. Sure, we are influenced by others, but something in our own innate natures, something inside of us, would always total more than the sum of interactions with others. I would always bounce back from the way people treated me, that my sense of self would always mean that the outer world would not, could not, affect me and that I would be able to move through life in my own way.

If anything, the last few months have taught me something very different. My realisation was that, no matter how much we pretend, we are not invincible. There are no shields and armour to wear, just a selection of weapons that we all walk around with and use daily on each other. People are fragile. We are as fragile as glass and it is not difficult to shatter the very being of a person. As we walk around we impact on the people around us, leaving invisible footprints and finger marks over the lives of others, creating filmy gauzes over their perspectives on life. It is easy to break people - far, far too easy, and we don't normally notice when we have done this. And sometimes those battle wounds heal, but the scars stay as a constant reminder of the hurt we inflict on each other.

People are fragile and need to be handled with care.

We all wander around holding the signs on which we have written "handle with care". We long for people to understand them - mostly, we think everyone should be able to read them and understand them. But I realise that sometimes they aren't clear enough - the letters are too small, or unclear, or we can't read the language. Sometimes we are embarrassed about the sign that we carry and try to hide it. Whatever happens, people don't see it and then we get broken.

I can feel myself fragmenting into pieces. Once there was a little girl who seemed like a whole person. Now all I can see is these different parts of myself scattered about, with no sense of cohesion. I am broken and, like some brittle plastic toy, I am not sure how to fix it - even if I wanted to be fixed. For that is my question right now. Do I really want to go back to that multitude of selves? Do I want to be involved with other people? I don't want to be broken and I don't want to be imprinted. It's not necessarily the big life events that crack us, but the small, seemingly insignificant ones - the ones we don't notice until later on.

When I meet other people, I feel like I give away part of my self that I can never get back. And part of the reason I am struggling so much right now is that I feel like I gave so much of myself to the boy. He took those parts of me that I offered to him, and now, far from me, he holds them - probably unknowingly. I am left with this shell that once was a person, with scattered fragments that haunt my existence and my dreams.

Poor little girl. I wish she had never grown up. She would have never known what it felt like to feel herself splintering into pieces and her sense of self die.