A Thousand Quiet Fractures

No one tells you that you could break your own heart.

I always thought heartbreak would come from someone else—

a lover walking away, a betrayal, a silence too loud to bear.

But I learned it was me.

It was the choices I didn’t make,

the dreams I abandoned out of fear,

the way I turned my back on the parts of myself

that needed care the most.

I broke my heart every time I settled,

every time I swallowed my truth

because I thought it was too heavy for others to carry.

I broke it when I believed the voices

that said I wasn’t enough,

when I convinced myself

that survival was the same thing as living.

There was no great explosion, no dramatic ending—

just small fractures,

a thousand tiny betrayals of my own making.

And by the time I looked down,

I was standing in the wreckage,

cut on the glass I’d been dropping for years.

But here’s the part no one tells you either:

the same hands that break it

can learn how to hold it,

to piece it back together,

to love what’s left.

And maybe that’s the hardest lesson of all—

that healing doesn’t come from someone else,

it begins the moment you stop breaking

your own heart.