There is someone who has a damaged heart. E grows up somehow making the most of life, having a sense of survival that astounds those around em when it is called upon. After a series of life-altering events, e decides to try to better the world by putting eir talents to work, and ultimately meets other people and achieves what e hadn’t thought possible.
Having achieved that, and no longer playing the same game where those survival skills are useful, e can’t sleep. Listless, working on all manner of things, trying to figure out what is going on in this new world. Finally, after more trials, e begins to understand that the thing that had driven em to this point in the first place was eir heart, the shrapnel that remains a painful reminder of how e learned to survive in the first place.
I went and saw Iron Man 3 in a theater by myself, tonight. I cried. I needed a dark room and distractions and what was apparently a lesson from the universe to recalibrate. Humans are wired for struggle, and when we don’t have problems to solve, we create new ones. I am taking this round out, before I create new problems for myself. There are plenty of things to solve, and people to work with in this real world.
Right now I need to go get this shrapnel removed.