We all see life through a lens, shaped by our past, framed by our experiences, coloured by our pain. And when that lens is cracked, so is our view of the world. What we perceive isn’t always what it is, it’s what it was. A betrayal from years ago becomes the filter through which we read every new intention. A heartbreak distorts every new love. A single failure echoes into every fresh opportunity.

This is the curse of the broken lens: it convinces us we’re seeing clearly, when really, we’re only seeing fragments. Shadows of the past masquerade as truths in the present, and so we become suspicious of kindness, anxious in calm, doubtful in joy, not because those things are untrue, but because we don’t trust them to last.

Healing, then, is not just about fixing what’s inside, it’s about cleaning the glass we look through. It's realizing that not every relationship will repeat the last. That not every "no" means rejection. That not everyone is out to break us. Sometimes, the world isn’t cruel, just our lens is cracked.

And when we begin to see that, we start replacing distortion with clarity, fear with curiosity, and the past with the possibility of something better, because life doesn’t need to change, only the way we look at it.