Not Broken Anymore

Breaking the Silence

For a long time, I didn’t talk about what happened to me.

Not because I didn’t remember.

Not because it didn’t matter.

But because staying quiet felt safer. I learned early on how to protect other people’s comfort — even when those people had already taken something from me. Even after they were gone. I carried their memories more carefully than my own.

This collection comes from the moment that silence stopped working.

Not Broken Anymore is rooted in the reality of childhood sexual assault and the long aftermath that follows it. Not the version that fits neatly into language, but the version that lives in the body — in vigilance, in fractured trust, in the constant negotiation between visibility and self-protection.

The work isn’t about recounting events. It’s about what remains.

The plague doctor became central to this series because of what it represents historically: a figure meant to heal, called into moments of crisis, wearing the appearance of protection — and yet often bringing harm alongside care. That contradiction mirrors something deeply familiar. The expectation that someone who is supposed to protect you will do so. The confusion when they don’t. The damage that comes not only from violence, but from betrayal.

The mask matters. It hides the face. It creates distance. It allows harm to happen without accountability. In that way, it echoes how abuse often survives — behind silence, authority, and the expectation that the victim will carry the weight quietly.

I lived with that silence for years. I learned how to minimize, how to rationalize, how to protect the people who hurt me — even in my own thoughts. I became skilled at surviving without taking up space. At being intact on the outside while something fractured stayed hidden underneath.

This work doesn’t try to soften that reality. It doesn’t offer comfort where there wasn’t any. It doesn’t ask for sympathy. It asks for presence.

There is anger here. There is grief. There is defiance. But there is also restraint. These pieces aren’t loud for the sake of being loud. They are deliberate. Measured. Built layer by layer, the way truth often has to be approached when it’s been buried for too long.

Not Broken Anymore isn’t about fixing what happened. It’s about refusing the lie that what happened destroyed me.

The title matters. Not because everything is healed, or resolved, or clean — but because “broken” was never the right word to begin with. Damaged things don’t persist the way survivors do. They don’t adapt. They don’t learn how to live inside contradiction.

This collection exists because I stopped protecting what harmed me more than I protected myself.

It stands as proof that survival doesn’t have to be quiet.

That naming something doesn’t give it power — it takes it back.

That dignity doesn’t come from silence.

This work isn’t asking to be consumed.

It’s asking to be witnessed.