You never liked the word broken.
It made you feel like something that needed fixing, like a cracked vase waiting for glue. So instead, you learned to decorate the cracks.

At first, it was harmless black eyeliner too sharp to touch, rings that gleamed like armor, and a playlist filled with songs that screamed the words you could never say out loud. You told yourself it was just style. But deep down, it was your way of turning pain into performance.

People said you had an “aesthetic.” They meant the way your sadness looked beautiful in pictures. The way you turned every heartbreak into a quote, every scar into a story, every night into an art piece of survival.
And maybe that’s what it was art.
But not all art heals.

Your walls became galleries of your hurt. Each color on your canvas whispered the name of a person you lost, each tattoo hid a night you wished you could forget. You didn’t patch the wounds you framed them, photographed them, posted them, and called it you.

But some nights, when the lights dimmed and the filters faded, you caught a glimpse of the truth: the art wasn’t healing you it was hiding you.
You had mistaken your scars for a self-portrait.

One day, you stood before a mirror, stripped of makeup, jewelry, noise, and style. For the first time, you didn’t look like the person the world admired.
You just looked like someone who had been hurt and survived.

And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe identity isn’t the decoration of wounds, but the quiet decision to stop bleeding.