I remember the moment
like a crack in time,
splitting me open,
leaving everything I thought I was
scattered on the floor.
I stood there,
staring at my reflection,
but I didn’t recognize the person
looking back.
Something was missing,
something I’d lost
that I couldn’t name.
It wasn’t one big thing.
It was small,
like the quiet breaking of a thread
you didn’t even know it was there.
It snapped,
and suddenly,
everything unraveled.
I watched myself come apart
from the inside out,
silently,
hopelessly,
and I didn’t even try to stop it.
I don’t know when I started to slip,
when I stopped being the person
I thought I was.
It happened so slowly,
like a shadow creeping across the ground,
too quiet to notice
until it swallows the light.
And when I finally saw it,
when I finally realized,
it was too late.
The disappointment hit me
like a punch to the gut,
stealing the air from my lungs,
leaving me hollow.
I could feel it,
the weight of it,
pressing down on my chest,
wrapping around my throat,
tightening until all I could do
was standing there,
frozen,
choking on the truth of who I had become.
I wanted to scream,
to rage,
to tear myself apart
and build something new,
someone better,
someone who didn’t make mistakes,
who didn’t let herself fall,
who didn’t fail?
But I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t breathe.
I just stood there,
drowning in the quiet failure
of myself.
I had always been so sure,
so confident of my strength,
of my ability to keep going,
to push through.
But that day,
that moment,
I felt it all slip through my fingers,
like sand I couldn’t hold onto,
no matter how tightly I clenched my fists.
And the worst part?
The worst part was knowing.
I had no one else to blame.
It wasn’t the world; it wasn’t someone else’s fault.
It was me.
I had let myself down.
I had made promises to myself,
silent vows I thought I would never break.
But I broke them,
and I didn’t even realize
until it was too late to fix it.
The cracks were already there,
and now they were too deep to ignore.
I wanted to go back,
to rewind time,
to undo the choices,
the moments
that led me here,
to this feeling,
this bitter taste in my mouth
that I couldn’t swallow down.
But time doesn’t work like that.
Regret doesn’t come with an eraser,
and the weight of my disappointment
was too heavy to carry.
I stood there for what felt like forever,
wondering how I had gotten here,
how I had become someone
I didn’t recognize it.
The mirror didn’t lie.
It showed me the truth—
the truth of my weakness,
my failure,
and it burned.
I thought about all the times
I had told myself
I was better than this,
stronger than this,
that I would never let myself
become the thing I feared.
But there I was,
standing in the wreckage
of my own making,
and there was no one to pull me out.
I had to face it,
the version of myself
I never wanted to see it,
the version that wasn’t enough,
that had fallen short,
that had broken her own heart.
And in that moment,
I learned something
I never wanted to know—
that I could disappoint myself,
that I could fail,
and that I would have to live with it.
The first time
I was disappointed in myself
was the moment
I realized I wasn’t perfect,
that I wasn’t unbreakable,
that I wasn’t the person
I had imagined in my head.
And that truth—
that ugly, bitter truth—
was a weight
I wasn’t ready to carry.
But now,
I have no choice.
