"A Broken Man" by Marcopolo A

I don’t remember how long I stood there. The only thing that I do remember was the rain; the rain and what I would later recall to my therapist, as one of my episodes.

 It had taken a lifetime to build my way up. And for the past two years I was able to live with myself. But this day was different. I couldn’t look at myself anymore. Every mirror showed an image of disgust, an image of failure.

“Why did I feel this way?” I would ask myself. The answer became very clear on that day. I had lost who I was. My failures, every one of my defeats; all of them were standing in front of me, glaring at me. And I couldn’t bear them any longer.  Each one was a slow and excruciating stab at my heart.

  I used to be a man that could learn from a defeat, who could rise and take life by the reins. But this year had changed everything. My defeats began to define me and on that day I tried to escape from them.

Many years later, I would recall to my therapist that without noticing, I had found myself running. I didn’t know where I was going; all I knew was that my life, everything I knew, was over.

To those of you who don’t know me, I am one of the most ambitious people that you might meet. The dishonesty, the ability to easily betray friends; those are what allowed me to reach my dreams. Defeat was something that I never took lightly.

 Though very few and far between, I began to see more and more failures within my life that day. They began to grow, and with them my ambition slowly shrank. That is where I lost myself.

ON THAT DAY, I came to the realization, that my dreams were gone; that I no longer had ambition. The fact of the matter was that I had lost everything; I had lost who I was because my failures had come to define me.

Without the help of my therapist I would never have been able to break the hold that my failures had on me. Only now I do I realize that’s it’s not your failures nor your defeats that define you, but how you react to them

I