I grow up carrying a repair kit with me everywhere I go. It isn’t a physical toolkit filled with spanners, screws, wire-cutters, or duct tape, but an emotional one – a collection of coping mechanisms, defenses, and the mental capacity to fix whatever might break in my world. I learn that life is like a wheel, always turning and moving through its cycles but lately it stopped altogether, leaving me stuck at the bottom.
People often notice the weight I seem to carry, asking if it’s heavy to bear. I smile, maybe even joke about it, but deep down, I know the truth: It is heavy. At times, it feels like too much to carry, like the weight is slowly crushing me, but I keep going because what else can I do? I can’t afford to let things fall apart, not when I work so hard to keep them together. They are all I have.
So I keep trying, trying and trying until my hands are full of dirt and smudge, until my spirit is bruised and crushed. I change the spare parts as best as I can, hoping that the new ones will hold, that they might work for a while. And sometimes they do – sometimes, the fixes hold just long enough to give me a brief breather, a momentary illusion that everything is okay. But, deep down, I always know it isn’t permanent. I know that it will break down again, that the lights will dim, that the wheels will stop turning, and that I will be back where I started, scrambling to find new spare parts – just in case.
It isn’t just the things I fix that are fragile – I am fragile too. Each time something breaks, a part of me breaks with it. Each time I have to dig deep into that repair kit, I feel a little more of myself slipping away, lost in the dust and grease of endless repair work. It is exhausting to live in a world where nothing stays fixed, where everything seems to be constantly on the verge of breaking down. Where I have to give my all just to see someone look at me with pride.
