A.S. Thorne

Has your reflection ever looked back at you and felt… unfamiliar?

Not because your hair was messy or your eyes were tired, but because something inside had shifted—quietly, maybe, but irrevocably. A moment where the version of you staring from the glass didn’t feel like yours. Or maybe it was. Maybe it was the truest one. The one you’ve been too tired, too careful, or too haunted to let rise.

I think we all shatter, eventually.

Not in some dramatic collapse—but in tiny, almost invisible fractures.
Cracks formed by the weight of expectations.
Hairline breaks from all the times we were told who we had to be.
The slow splintering of silence, guilt, grief, or simply trying to hold it all together.

Some of us are broken by the things that happened.
Others by the things no one noticed.
Some of us just… split under the pressure of pretending we were fine.

The mirror remembers all of it.
Even the things we’d rather forget.
Even the selves we buried just to survive.

But here’s the thing I’ve learned:
Shattering isn’t the end.
Sometimes, it’s the beginning of seeing more clearly.
Because once something breaks, it stops lying.

You can see what’s underneath.
You can choose which pieces to keep.
You can begin again—not polished, but true.

If you’ve ever looked into a mirror and not recognized who you were…
You’re not alone.
You’re not broken beyond repair.
You’re just in the middle of becoming.

—A.S. Thorne