I’m not good at this whole “love” thing. I’m not good at this whole “family” thing. Not because I’m somehow prejudiced against these concepts, or because I find them boring, but because I’m a fractured person. I’m an old-time painting. Look closely, and you can see the cracks in the paint.

I’ve discovered that the only thing that matters is loving your loved ones. You have to love your loved ones, or else they grow to be misshapen and dented by your lack of love. I say this as a severely misshapen and dented person – so dented, that my market value is too low for me to be a decent investment. So dented that it’s a little embarrassing. I’m in a leadership position at Russia’s oldest English-language newspaper. I’m a wife and mother. And say to you: growing up unloved is the most terrifying thing. It does things to you that you don’t even notice – until you begin doing the very same things to the people around you.

I shouldn’t talk about these things publicly. At the very least, I should save them up for a memoir of some kind, not splash them across a blog like a 15-year-old girl. But I don’t have the energy for memoirs, frankly, and neither do I have the self-restraint to go about my business, keep writing for various publications, and somehow not talk to my readers about what’s going on inside of me. I don’t do it out of some vain hope that it may change somebody’s life. Rather, I seek to unburden myself.

The Russian theater world is currently discussing the tragic suicide of the young executive  director of the famous Kolyada Theater in Yekaterinburg, in the Urals. Of course, the main portion of the blame appears to lie with her ex-lover, a man who humiliated and threatened her, driving her to the brink of despair. But abusers sense their victims’ weakness long ahead of time. They’re sharks that smell blood in the water. And too often, that blood is spilled early on, in childhood, when we’re too young to defend ourselves or to comprehend what’s happening to us and throw up an emotional barrier of some kind.

I can’t argue against vulnerability – without vulnerability, I could not write. But I can and will argue against being broken There’s nothing romantic about. Nothing artistic. Nothing special. Broken is broken. It turns you into nothing more than a collection of dangerous, glinting shards.