It starts with a needle.  The needle could be anything: a bad breakup, the tyranny of your father, physical bruises in unmentionable places that a person you trusted created.  Then, it floods your veins and this very thing soaks my being with a rainbow.  Now, your pasty skin is turning colors, from purple to red to green to blue.  You know that having waves in your body is wrong, but it is not from a single substance alone.  It is more of a feeling, a pulse, a sensation.  It feels like a shard of glass that saws ever so effortlessly between the layers of your flesh because it wishes to get to what is underneath.  This emotion is overcome with desire, but sometimes it still makes you want to stop breathing.  Sometimes it makes you believe that laying yourself to rest in an easy place where no one would find you or even try to is the only way to deal with it.  It comes and goes for no reason when you are depressed, and it is the factor that drives you to the edge, as well as the very element that keeps you from jumping. While, in one sense, you are no longer you, it may be changing you for the better.  After all, this type of person and item can be fixed, altered, morphed into a better human being and thing.  This creates a tighter and stronger bond between people who are in the same place.  It allows stories to be told that would ordinarily be hidden on a dusty shelf among outdated cookbooks and magazines.  Roots of intolerance can be severed when we realize that everyone experiences this, and it may cause us to view everyone as a person rather than a label.  Because we are damaged, we know that we will ascend from this place of despair. In essence, brokenness is a paradox; it makes you feel like dying would be easier, but it is also the only way you know you're still alive.