Shadows of difference: 7. Shattered Dreams

This is my story—shattered, broken, and scattered in pieces. I had the light. I had the energy. I fought. I listened. I gave everything I had. But looking back, I know what was missing: them. They left me behind, and I was always left with fragments, never whole. I missed the mark, but they never gave me what I needed. They watched as I stumbled, knowing I could never reach the finish line without their help, yet they stayed silent.

This is a world-class country, but only for those who were taught how to play the fake game, the ones who knew how to conform, to pretend. For the rest of us, the ones who don’t fit, the ones who are real, it’s a place that chews us up and spits us out. The glass fragments represent all the dreams I held, once brilliant, now distorted by their absence. The swirling void? It’s the emptiness they left in me, a cold, endless space where my aspirations drift, hopeless, unreachable. And the faint light that barely shines through? It’s the remnants of hope, fragile and dying—like the little bits they left behind, the pieces they never gave me.

Shattered Dreams is my fury. My anger at being left to pick up the pieces of a dream they never believed in. It’s the raw truth of being abandoned, of giving everything and receiving nothing. It’s the weight of knowing I could have been whole, if only they’d bothered to help me.