You’re Not Broken
A moment that changed everything
Sometimes the most transformative moments in our lives are quiet ones.
They don’t come with fanfare or a breakthrough or a grand realization.
Sometimes, they arrive as a single sentence from someone who loves you.
Once, early in my healing journey, I called myself broken. I don’t remember what I was talking about—but I remember thinking of myself as a problem to be fixed. And in that moment, my now-husband paused and gently said:
“I don’t want you to talk about yourself like that. You’re not broken.”
He didn’t say it with judgment. He said it with care. And something in me shifted.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t explain. I just... listened.
Even though I didn’t believe it yet, I stopped saying it out loud.
And that changed something.
The words we repeat become the story we live
It’s strange how powerful language is. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but every time I said “I am broken,” I was reinforcing an image of myself I no longer wanted to carry.
Those words sank in. They shaped the way I thought about myself.
And those thoughts slowly started to shape how I moved through the world.
But once I stopped saying I was broken, I started thinking it less.
I started wondering if maybe I was just… tired. Or overwhelmed. Or hurting. But not broken.
And with that tiny shift, a different life started to take shape—not because I had everything figured out, but because I had stopped feeding the belief that something was fundamentally wrong with me.
You’re not broken. You may just be carrying old beliefs.
What I’ve come to understand is this: most of us aren’t broken.
We’re just living out patterns that were never truly ours.
Ideas we absorbed from our families, our culture, the internet, old fears, old pain.
When you’ve spent your life believing that your worth depends on what you achieve,
or that your needs are too much,
or that being “good” means being quiet and agreeable—
it’s easy to feel lost inside your own life.
But that doesn’t mean you’re broken.
It might just mean you’ve been shaped by ideas that were never meant to define you.
Ideas that maybe weren’t even yours.
And the beautiful thing is, those beliefs can be softened.
You don’t need to be taken apart and put back together.
You don’t need to find a brand new version of yourself.
You can begin, simply, by paying attention to the way you speak to yourself.
Listen to your inner voice when things go wrong, when you’re overwhelmed, when you make a mistake.
Are those words kind?
Are they something you’d say to someone you love?
Do they even sound like you?
If not—maybe, like I did—you can start by just not saying them out loud.
That’s all.
You don’t have to believe a new truth right away.
You just have to stop reinforcing the old one.
A gentle invitation
If you’ve been calling yourself broken, I want to gently offer you this:
Maybe you’re not.
Maybe you’re just human. Maybe you’re tired. Or healing. Or still becoming.
Try saying something different. Or say nothing at all.
Just leave room for the possibility that you are not broken.
That alone might be the beginning of everything.