It Wasn't Me

I used to think it was me.

When I went along with the hash in the Air Force, when I let

myself be shaped by others, when I found fleeting pleasure even as I endangered everything around me—I thought that was me. I thought it was proof of my weakness, proof of a malleable core that bent whichever way the wind blew. I carried the shame of that. I let that shame whisper to me for years: “This is who you are. You are a man who bends. You are a man who cannot stand.”

But it wasn’t me.

It was the absence of me. It was a hollowed-out boy grown into a hollowed-out man, without a rooted self to say yes or no. Without a voice that could rise and claim, “I am.” This is the nature of complex PTSD—when trauma repeats itself in childhood, when the mirroring

every child needs to form a self is missing, the child learns to dissociate. Dissociation is more than detachment; it is disappearing from yourself to survive. And when it is practiced day after day, year after year, it leaves behind something deeper than brokenness.

It leaves behind the fracture.

Fracture is not a crack that can be mended with glue. It is the shattering of a mirror before the reflection has ever appeared. It is the hollow where a rooted self should have been, the silence where a voice should have grown, the collapse of identity before identity was ever allowed to stand. Fracture is waking up to discover that the “I” you thought was yours was only a ghost—a placeholder for the self you never got to form.

Fracture is the child who learns that invisibility is safer than being seen, who becomes an adult still half-vanished. It is the boy who hides inside silence so long that silence becomes his language. It is the man who mistakes absence for essence, who carries shame as if it were his birthright. Fracture means living decades without the anchor most people take for granted: the simple knowing of who they are. It is not only pain—it is erasure.

That’s why I thought it was me when I stumbled through relationships.

I thought it was just shyness, just awkwardness, just not knowing enough to hold a conversation or spark attraction. But what looked like shyness was dissociation. What felt like stupidity was the fracture itself. I wasn’t just fumbling my words—I was fumbling the very existence of an “I” to bring into the conversation.

I thought it was me when I became a father and faltered.

I thought it was my failure, my ignorance, my incapacity to do better. Maybe I didn’t know enough about fatherhood, maybe I just wasn’t made for it. I carried the guilt of every silence, every absence, every moment I couldn’t show up the way I longed to. But even there, it wasn’t the absence of love—it was the fracture. I loved, but fracture carried itself into everything I touched. And love, fractured, can wound even as it longs to heal.

I thought it was me when no one seemed to see or hear me.

I thought people just ignored me, that I simply didn’t matter. But invisibility wasn’t only in them—it was in me. Without a mirror in childhood, the self never learned its own face. The fracture became its own invisibility, a cloak that covered me even when I stood in plain sight. I stood in crowds and felt faceless. I stood in churches and felt nameless. I stood in my own home and felt voiceless. And I thought that was me.

I thought the ravenous beasts were outside of me, stalking in the dark.

I thought their teeth were sharp and waiting, eager to rip me apart. They haunted my nights, whispered through my days. It took me years to see they were born from my own fractured self-image—shame sharpened into fangs, self-hatred dressed as predators. And still, I didn’t know it was complex PTSD. I only knew I was hunted.

For decades I thought the fracture was my identity.

I thought weakness, failure, stupidity, invisibility—that was me. But fracture is not identity. Fracture is what happens when identity is stolen before it can form. It is the wound of absence itself.

And yet. Even from fracture, something longed.

Even from absence, something reached. Even as I mistook the hollow for identity, a seed was still alive. That seed was longing for light. Longing for beauty. Longing for truth. Longing for meaning. The fracture did not erase the seed. It did not erase the hunger. That

hunger is why I could never stop noticing small things—why a line of music could pierce me, why a shaft of sunlight could undo me, why words could feel like oxygen.

That longing is what led me here.

That longing is what made me notice the smallest slivers of light when others passed them by. That longing is what made me write metaphors, paint images with words, search for meaning even when the reasoning was twisted against me. That longing is why I could never fully give up, why I kept searching, why I sit here now. The fracture was real, but so was the seed. The absence was real, but so was the reaching.

So the reasoning has shifted.

What I once called weakness I now see as dissociation. What I once called failure I now see as survival. What I once called stupidity I now see as the fracture left behind by complex PTSD. The meaning remains—the paradox of being both born in darkness and drawn to light. But the reasoning that carried me to that meaning no longer condemns me. It frees me. It rewrites the “why” without stealing the “what.”

I can grieve the old reasoning, because it was familiar.

It was the scaffold I lived inside for decades. I leaned on it even as it hurt me. I built my identity around it because it was all I had. Letting it go feels like losing a companion, however cruel. But I can also honor it—it got me here. It kept me moving long enough to discover the truer foundation beneath. And even if the scaffold crumbles, the meaning remains.

And now, I can say it plainly:

I thought it was me.

But it wasn’t me. It was the fracture—the hollow carved by trauma, the absence born of complex PTSD, the silence that dissociation left behind. And even from that absence, light still broke through. Even from the hollow, beauty still found me. Even from the fracture, I still learned to speak in metaphors, to sing with words, to paint my longing on paper. The absence did not erase me. It only delayed me. And now, even with tears in my eyes, I can see: I am here. These words written by this author - this is the I in Me, And I am here!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zycG9iGqlWQ