I’m Broken

The sun sank behind the Seattle skyline, washing the city in a bittersweet orange hue. The kind of light that makes you feel something — nostalgia, maybe. Or loss.

Maya Carter stood by her apartment window, clutching a chipped coffee mug, her fingers numb though the drink was still warm. From the outside, she had it all — a promising career at a tech startup, a sleek studio apartment downtown, and a wardrobe filled with the right clothes for the right occasions. But inside, she felt like glass: clear, functional, and on the verge of shattering with one more careless touch.

"I'm broken," she whispered, her voice barely louder than the hum of the city below. No one was around to hear it. Not that anyone would have known what to say if they had.

Maya hadn't always been like this. Two years ago, she was the life of every brunch table, the spontaneous road-trip planner, the one who believed in manifesting dreams with moon journals and Spotify playlists. But when her mother died unexpectedly, something in her unraveled. Grief wasn't loud. It didn't come in storms. It came like dust — settling slowly over everything she once loved, coating it in silence and disinterest.

At work, she smiled. She replied to emails. She laughed at the right times. But inside, she was only performing the idea of being okay. She was a ghost in a business casual blazer.

One rainy Thursday, on a whim or maybe desperation, Maya walked into a community pottery class tucked behind a bookstore in Capitol Hill. The instructor, a bearded man with paint on his jeans named Theo, handed her a lump of cold clay and said, “Break it. Then start again.”

She thought he was joking. But when he saw the confusion on her face, he explained: “Kintsugi. It’s a Japanese technique. You repair broken pottery with gold. The flaws become the story. The cracks make it beautiful.”

It stuck with her — that idea. That maybe her pain wasn’t a weakness but a detail. A line of gold waiting to be poured.

She kept going back. Every Thursday. Clay under her nails, the earthy scent of the studio, the way the wheel spun like time paused. It was messy, imperfect, frustrating — and exactly what she needed.

Over weeks, she built something. A misshapen mug. A crooked bowl. Then a vase that cracked in the kiln. She didn’t throw it away. She filled the cracks with liquid gold lacquer. It gleamed like lightning frozen in place.

The more she shaped clay, the more she reshaped herself.

One evening, as the class ended and others shuffled out, Theo lingered beside her. “You know,” he said, glancing at her vase, “people think broken means ruined. But sometimes it just means real.”

She didn’t answer right away. She didn’t need to.

Later that night, Maya posted a picture of the vase on her neglected Instagram with a single caption:

“I’m broken. But maybe that’s where the light gets in.”

The likes didn’t matter. The comments didn’t matter. What mattered was the truth in her words. For the first time in months, she wasn’t hiding. She was healing.

Maya still had bad days. Grief didn’t pack up and leave just because you found a new hobby. But now, when it came, she let it sit beside her. Like an old friend who didn’t need to speak.

She drank her morning coffee from that crooked mug. It wobbled slightly at the base, but it held warmth — just like her.

She wasn’t perfect. She wasn’t whole.

But she was still here. Still creating. Still rising.

And maybe — just maybe — she wasn’t broken at all.