For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt an odd, almost painful connection to Humpty Dumpty. On the surface, he’s just a nursery rhyme—an egg on a wall who falls and can’t be put back together again. But to me, he was always more than that. He was a metaphor. A mirror.

I recently stumbled upon digital medical files from the ICU hospitalization that this entry refers to, and as I read through them, I was struck by how much of that time still eludes me—fragmented and disorienting. The files offer a window into a deeply complex period of emotional trauma, one that I’ve only been able to piece together in bits and pieces, scattered through a haze of broken memories and confusion. At first, I was frozen in place, overwhelmed by the rawness of what I was reading, unsure of how to process the details that were once just echoes in my mind.

We talk about sexual violence like it happens in a vacuum, as if it begins and ends with the act itself. But that’s not how it works. Abuse is never just one person’s doing. It’s a structure. A stage built plank by plank from silence, excuses, admiration, and denial.

I don’t know what I thought middle age would feel like, but I didn’t think it would feel like this. I had vague ideas once, soft-edged and sparkling with something like certainty—that life would settle. I thought the pieces would click together and I’d walk through my days with an air of having arrived. But instead, here I am, standing in the wreckage of expectations I didn’t even realize I was still carrying.

Thankful for the small things, the tiny things, the in-between things—the way the wind sneaks through the cracks in the morning, whispers of coffee steam curling like ghostly lullabies, the scuff of a shoe on pavement, the hush of a friend’s voice saying I hear you. The weight of a book in your hands, the rhythm of a song that rattles your bones just right, headlights stretching long down an empty road.

I have loved stars that collapsed into themselves. People who once burned with the kind of brilliance that made you believe in something bigger—something divine. They carried light in their hands, in their words, in the way they saw the world with wild, unfiltered wonder. But like Icarus, like Lucifer, like every fallen thing that ever thought itself untouchable, they flew too high, reached too far, believed themselves invincible.

The world is uncomfortable with what it cannot see. We are taught to rally against cancer, to wage wars on failing organs, but we do not know how to hold space for the quiet, interior battles. We turn away from suffering that does not bleed, does not show itself in scars and statistics. And yet, pain is pain. It does not lessen because it is unseen.

I am learning the girl I once was. Her face, her hands, her voice appear in old photographs, in journals with ink bleeding like bruises. She startles me. Her mania hangs in the air like smoke; her suffering is sharp, unyielding. I read her pages and shiver at the clarity of her terror and courage.