An Internet trend seems to have developed over the past couple years. You may have seen these articles, whether you read them or scrolled past them. They have headlines like "How the Broken Girl Loves Differently," "When You Start to Miss the Girl You Left Broken," "The Real Reason Why You Can't Fix a 'Broken' Guy," or "An Open Letter to The Broken Girl." In these articles, "broken" is describes a person's emotional or mental state. The "broken" person in most of these articles is recovering from something, usually a breakup.
Displaying vulnerability is a powerful way of connecting with other people and knowing that there are thousands or even millions of people in the world who can identify with your struggles is a huge connecting factor. But unhealthy language can enter our daily vocabularies without us even noticing it. The moment a person identifies as broken, she decides that she is faulty.
If we identify ourselves as broken, we are essentially stamping ourselves with a label that screams to the world, "I don't work properly." We put ourselves into the "faulty" category and consequently take power away from ourselves. We are all here, living and breathing. We may feel broken sometimes, but the fact that we exist at all is something of a miracle.
There are ways to convey our personal struggles and connect with others that don't create pigeonholing labels for ourselves. The truth is that nearly everyone experiences a breakup or some kind of heartache. And that experience may very well leave a person forever changed, but nobody is broken.
