My whole life I've been a collector and up until recently I never really knew what that meant. My mother would tell me "you're a collector of broken toys, Valkyrie. That's just who you are." And I never really understood what she meant. I just shrugged it off as some parental bullshit she had to say to try to help her process that she had a mentally ill, emotionally damaged child. But as I approach my second decade of being on this earth I realized that when she spoke of broken toys she didn't mean the little pieces of broken dolls, shattered legos, lost dice or singular Polly pocket shoe I had found in my many travels throughout the house. She meant people. She meant the friends I chose to surround myself with. The humans who I interacted with on a daily basis and thought of as important characters in my life story.
I am a collector of broken toys. I am drawn to broken people because I want to "fix" them, I want to make them happy and feel "whole" again. Even if that means breaking myself into pieces to fill those cracks where parts of them have gone missing. I am a finished puzzle but if it meant others would create a full happy image, I would gladly scramble and make my picture completely unrecognizable to replace others missing pieces.
In fixing all these broken toys I myself have become broken because once you fix a toy they always know where your shop is. They return after the second, third and sometimes fifth time they've been broken knowing you will fix them because all you want to do is help. You break yourself down till you can't do it anymore and then they say you never really cared because you can't fix them this one last time. You become the enemy because for once you worry about yourself.
Don't be a collector of broken toys, it just leads to you being broken and there are enough broken toys already.
