I Tried To Fix Myself

I ruin things when I try too hard to fix them. I panic at the sound of something falling apart. I gather the pieces with shaking hands, trying to return them to who they used to be. As if nothing cracked. As if nothing changed. I believed once you break, you stay broken. That damage is permanent. That the old version was the only version worth keeping. But the pieces never fit the same way again. They shifted. They formed something unfamiliar. And I realized the breaking did not end me. It reshaped me. The cracks did not mean failure. They meant pressure. They meant growth. I am not what I was before. I am what survived the fall.