When you spend your teenage years with a broken, rotting husk in the part of you that should be a pale, clean thing — a flower, a dove, a raw egg —  you spend a lot of time telling yourself that it makes you better. You stare at the walls of your room for hours, or sweat through your hoodie in the summer heat, or teach yourself how to hide the scent of cigarettes from your homeroom teacher. The essay you write for your college admissions is excellent, and you spiral secret notebooks with dripping ink and blunt pencil scratches. At night, when the wind batters at the hatches over your window and your phone screen glows with the parties you can’t go to (aren’t invited to), you curl into your own arms and picture the day you, a shattered bowl, seal yourself with gold and fill up with a broth that fixes things. That makes everything better, healing the other broken girls with its strength. And slowly, with tentative steps on the edge of the pool and choking down small stones, you start to do the work. You lock yourself in the bathroom at school and trail pink highlighters over a self-help book you stole from the library. A podcast plays in your ears. By candlelight, you change your own bandages and drag an alcohol-soaked cotton ball over your wounds, burying them under shirt sleeves and blazers. The shrink who you almost make cry in your first session tells you that your chart shows all the progress you’ve made, sticks another gold star to your forehead. You get a cat, and a scholarship. You find new dorm rooms to stare at.  ​ Then, one day, you wake up. There’s a moment that happens — a blurry scene in a film, a page in a book, an old journal falling open. Someone on the street that looks a little too much like him. You reach your hand up to the aching cavern in your chest, the one that you taught yourself how to live with, the driving force, the moral compass you carry with you. And it doesn’t hurt as badly. Not anymore. ​ Something inside of you shatters. You’re not a better person. You haven’t saved the world. All these years, you thought it was making you larger than life, a hero, someone to be believed in. You work in a minimum wage customer service job. You love people. You smile at bartenders. It’s alright; it’s not a bad life. You’re as close to happy as you’ve ever been.​