The Splintered Self
By: Carol-Anne Naylor
Although this is written as fiction – and some of the details are fictionalised, this is written from my own very raw and very emotional journey of suffering. A journey born from longing, loss, grief and faith in God. However you experience loss and grief, you are not alone. I send you my love, always.
The Splintered Self
She is three women. Four, if you count the one who wakes at night with her chest pressed flat by invisible hands.
The first one laughs easily. She is chalk-dusted, paper-cut, surrounded by children’s questions that tumble like bright marbles. She corrects spelling tests, smiles at parents at the gate, carries coffee in her left hand and exhaustion in her right. They call her Teacher, though she has forgotten when her voice became so steady.
The second keeps lists: milk, bread, dinner, bills. She folds laundry into neat towers that lean like weary soldiers. She holds a child’s small palm as if it were the last unbroken thing in the world. They call her Mother.
The third. Ah, the third is harder to name. She is the one who buckles in the supermarket, skin rippling with a storm no one else can see. Her lungs flutter like trapped birds, and she crouches by the oranges in the fruit aisle, waiting for her heart to loosen its fist. To strangers she looks like a woman unravelling; to herself, she is simply Her.
And then there is the fourth, the one who kneels. She stitches prayers together with shaking fingers, threads them through the silence, hoping God has not turned away. She believes, even when belief feels like swallowing glass. This one is Believer.
They live in different rooms of the same house, but the doors are locked against one another. Teacher does not know Mother’s sorrow. Mother cannot hear Her’s breathless terror. Believer dares not look at any of them too closely.
Only at night, when the walls soften and the locks melt, do they whisper through the cracks: Are we one? Or are we many?
I will tell you their stories. But they belong to the same woman.
You will not see her clearly until the end.
The First Loss
It was a Tuesday, though she cannot remember the month. The calendar was heavy with scribbled notes, lesson observations, a birthday circled in purple. Ordinary things.
The Teacher walked into school that morning with her bag overstuffed, her smile rehearsed. She explained fractions to ten-year-olds, her hands carving the air into pieces that almost added up to clarity. She laughed when one boy said “Miss, are you a wizard?” and felt a sliver of warmth slip beneath her ribs.
The Mother, though, was not laughing. She was in a bathroom with pale tiles, her hands clenched on porcelain, the world spinning as a crimson thread loosened from her body. It was small, so small, barely more than a word that had been erased before it was spoken. But she knew. And in knowing, she broke.
She wiped her face before stepping into her son’s room. He was sprawled across the bed, cheeks flushed with sleep. She kissed his hair softly, breathing him in. One child safe in her arms, while another slipped away into silence.
The Believer pressed her forehead into praying hands that night. She whispered a Psalm she half-remembered, a plea tangled in the dust. She told herself this was a test, that God did not give more than one could bear. That his plan was to prosper her, not to harm her. That he cared for his children, for her. She repeated these until the syllables became a lullaby, though no sleep came.
And Her, the one without a name, stood at the threshold of the supermarket, basket dangling from a numb hand. The fluorescent lights hummed too loud, the aisles swayed, the shelves closed in. Too many people, strangers, pushed into her space. Her chest folded inward. She could not breathe. A stranger touched her elbow.
A women with kind eyes asked, “Are you alright, love?” but she could not answer. Her lungs were locked, her body foreign. She thought: I am dying here, between the apples and the bread.
They were not the same woman, not then. The Teacher went on with her marking. The Mother scrubbed the bathroom tiles. The Believer knelt until her knees bruised. And Her, she simply survived, though she could not tell you how.
It was only the first. There would be more.
Multiplying Shadows
The second time, she told herself it was a mistake. An accident. A cruel roll of the dice. The third, fourth and fifth time, she stopped using words like “chance.”
The Teacher kept her desk orderly, her handwriting neat, her face a practiced mask. She knew the exact pitch of voice to soothe a restless child, the precise curve of smile for an anxious parent. Outside, she was composed. Inside, she counted: one, two, three.
The Mother, though, lived in fragments of silence. She folded tiny items of clothing that would never again be worn, pressed her cheek against fabric that carried the scent of her son but never a sibling.
Each time, she buried another small dream in the drawer and closed it quietly. Each time, a small part of her heart withered too.
Still, there was laughter to be heard in the house, even through the heartache. A small boy with sticky fingers, with questions tumbling faster than answers. His presence was both balm and blade: joy pressed against grief, proof of life alongside shadows of loss.
Her, the one who dissolved, grew sharper in those months. Panic arrived in waves: a tightening throat in the queue at the post office, she forgot how to breathe and would find herself gasping for air, a sudden blindness would take over whilst driving home. She feared the death of those around her. Especially her son, her husband. The world turned hostile without warning. To Her, even air became an enemy.
And the Believer… she wavered. She read Job’s story again and again, searching for the place where grief met restoration. But her prayers sounded hollow, like knocking on a door in an empty house.
One woman taught. Another mourned. One collapsed. One prayed.
Together, they carried seven shadows, and each shadow asked the same unspoken question: How much more can one body lose before it disappears?
Panic’s Face
She thought panic was invisible, until it wasn’t.
It had a shape: claws closing around her ribs, eyes like search lights, breath stolen and bartered. It could enter anywhere: school corridors, the car park, her own bedroom at 3 a.m. Her body became its dwelling.
The Teacher hid it well. She excused herself between lessons, washed her hands longer than necessary, gripped the sink until her pulse slowed. She returned to the classroom with a smile as though nothing had happened.
The Mother tried to hush it with routine: feeding, tidying, counting, cleaning. Yet the panic always slipped beneath the door, sat at the kitchen table beside her, silent and waiting. Sometimes, when panic threatened to drown her, her son’s voice cut through like a lifeline. “Mummy, come play.” Two small words that dragged her back into the room, into her body. Into now.
Her, the storm of skin and bone, fought it in public, sweating under strip lights, gasping in frozen aisles, strangers staring. To them, she was simply unstable. To herself, she was burning alive from the inside out.
The Believer knelt harder, whispered louder, begged longer. Sometimes she thought the panic was punishment, a divine reminder of her smallness. Other times, she thought it was simply proof that she was breaking.
Panic was no longer faceless. It was a companion, cruel and intimate, following whichever woman wore the body that day.
The Questioning
By the sixth loss, faith was not a comfort but a blade.
The Believer asked questions into silence: Why me? Why this? She pressed her Bible closed, afraid the pages would answer with nothing but echoes.
Her son climbed into her lap, sticky with crumbs, insistent with love. She held him close, whispering a prayer she didn’t fully believe: “Keep him. Just keep him.”
The Teacher lectured on history. On kings and empires and the inevitability of collapse and wondered, secretly, if her body was just another fallen kingdom.
The Mother traced tiny names in her mind, ones she would never speak aloud. Each name became a ghost-child trailing behind her, unseen but heavy.
Her knelt on bathroom tiles, forehead pressed to cool ceramic, whispering through teeth clenched against panic, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”
Four women. One body. Too many graves dug in her heart.
And a God who seemed to watch from behind an unbroken sky.
Therapy Rooms
The chairs were always soft, the walls pale, the clock too loud.
The Teacher entered first, speaking clearly, listing symptoms as though reciting from a textbook. She used words like anxiety disorder and coping strategies, her voice trained to sound calm.
The Mother came next, quieter, twisting her hands in her lap. She confessed to sleepless nights, to folding clothes no child would wear, to crying in silence while stirring soup.
Her stormed in without permission. She couldn’t speak, not really. Her body shook, her heart raced, her throat closed. She sat on the floor and gasped until the session was over.
The Believer listened. She wanted the therapist to say God has a plan but instead heard words like trauma and chemical imbalance. She wondered if faith and medicine could live in the same body.
And always, there was another presence: the pills. Small, chalky, bitter. They became their own kind of character, both enemy and companion. Swallowed in the mornings, carried in a pocket like secret stones.
Sometimes she carried strength for her son alone. She wanted him to remember her laughter, not her trembling hands. Therapy was not only for herself, it was a shield she tried to build for him, though the metal was thin.
Therapy did not heal them. Not yet. But it held up a mirror, and for the first time, the women saw how close their faces were to each other’s.
Adopting Hope
The journey was long, measured not in miles but in paperwork.
The Teacher signed forms with precise loops of ink, answering questions with the same clarity she gave her students.
The Mother packed and unpacked the spare room, folding blankets, smoothing sheets, daring to imagine laughter in the quiet house.
Her waited in waiting rooms, knees bouncing, breath short, heart slamming at every new delay. She hated corridors, clipboards, the smell of disinfectant. Yet she endured.
The Believer prayed over each signature, each interview, each official stamp. She prayed for the unseen child, somewhere out there, waiting.
Adoption was not an event but a pilgrimage. Courtrooms were cathedrals. Social workers were gatekeepers. Every door opened slowly, so slowly and so terribly, emotionally painfully.
Still, they dreamed of another child, a brother or sister for the boy already growing before their eyes. He drew pictures with four figures: Mummy, Daddy, me and ‘baby.’ Hope expanded in crayon and ink, though the page would later remain unfinished.
Teaching While Breaking
The classroom was a stage. The Teacher stood tall, her voice strong, chalk dust blooming at the strike of her hand. She was steady, dependable. Miss, the one who never faltered.
The Mother lingered at the back of her mind. She packed lunches at dawn, checked homework by lamplight, carried exhaustion like a hidden stone.
Her crouched behind cupboard doors, heart hammering during breathless moments, forcing air into her lungs until she could stand again. No child ever knew. She would not allow them to see her splinter.
The Believer whispered prayers over each desk, over each child’s bowed head, asking God to let her brokenness be invisible to them.
But sometimes, in the middle of a lesson, all four voices slipped into one. She would pause mid-sentence, chalk still in hand, as a strange thought surfaced: What if I am not who they think I am? What if I am no one at all?
She always finished the lesson. Always smiled. But the question lingered, like an echo caught between walls.
At home, her son waited with drawings, with hugs that came with full force. He did not know she was splintering. To him, she was simply Mummy. The one who came back, always, even from the dark
The Mirror Shakes
By now, the seams were fraying.
The Teacher looked into the bathroom mirror and thought she saw the Mother’s face staring back.
The Mother dreamed of panic attacks that belonged to Her.
Her clutched the Bible one night and whispered prayers like the Believer.
The Believer stood before a classroom and wondered when she had learned how to teach.
The mirror rattled. Their reflections overlapped.
Were they separate women? Or simply shards of one, scattered by grief and held apart by fear?
The answer had not yet come. But the glass was cracking, and once it broke, they would see the truth.
Sometimes, in his laughter, all the fragments stilled at once. For a moment she was not Teacher, not Mother-of-loss, not Her, not only Believer. She was simply Mummy. Whole, if only for the length of a giggle.
The Son Already Held
There was already a boy, with laughter like bells and eyes that turned every shadow softer.
The Teacher packed his school bag each morning, tying shoelaces between stacks of marking. She showed him how to form letters, how to ask big questions.
The Mother tucked him in at night, humming lullabies that never left her lips for long. She breathed him in, the proof that she was not barren of love, that motherhood was already stitched into her bones.
Her still feared losing him: each cough, each stumble, each fever a spark that ignited the panic. Sometimes she woke in the night just to press her fingers to his chest, counting the rhythm of his breath.
And the Believer thanked God for him, fiercely, desperately. For the gift already given, even as other prayers went unanswered.
He was joy and anchor. Proof and paradox. The reminder of what was possible, and of all that had been taken away.
The Empty Cradle of Adoption
Hope returned once, dressed in paperwork and waiting rooms.
The Teacher answered questions with composure: How do you manage stress? How do you discipline? Her voice steady, professional.
The Mother prepared space in the house, folded blankets, set aside toys. She pictured laughter that had not yet arrived.
Her fidgeted in corridors, heart pounding at every delay, every silence on the other end of the phone. She feared that hope itself was dangerous.
The Believer prayed. Every form signed, every door opened, every hesitant promise; she offered it all as sacrifice. But the call never came. The room stayed empty. The hope dissolved.
The adoption ended not with a child in arms but with silence.
Four women sat together in that silence, realising there would be no new life to braid into their days.
The Collapse
Grief does not always scream.
Sometimes it sits heavy in the lungs, refusing to move.
This was the collapse: not just the panic attacks, not just the blood and the bathroom tiles, but the stillness of a dream denied.
The Teacher went on teaching. The Mother went on loving. Her went on trembling. The Believer went on praying. But now, the walls between them began to dissolve.
One day, standing before a mirror, they saw it: there had never been four women. There was only one, broken into parts to survive.
God’s Plan in the Dark
She did not receive the answer she hoped for. The children she lost did not return. The adoption journey closed its doors. But she still had her son. And she still had breath.
And perhaps that was enough.
She learned that God’s plan is not a path laid clear but a wilderness in which light appears in fragments. That acceptance is not surrender but a quieter kind of faith, the faith that even in loss, she is not abandoned.
Her life was not what she imagined. But it was hers. Scarred, incomplete, luminous in its broken edges. She did not end with triumph. She ended with peace.
All the Colours of the Dark
This is how she lived: in fragments, in shadows, in sudden bursts of light.
Teacher. Mother. Her. Believer.
Not four, but one.
Not whole, but holy in the breaking.
The colours of the dark are many, but together, they make light.
About Carol-Anne Naylor
Carol-Anne is a writer, teacher, and mother whose work explores the fragile intersections between identity, loss, and hope. Her writing blurs the boundaries between fiction and memoir, weaving lyrical prose with raw emotional truth.
In The Splintered Self, she examines the quiet disintegration that followed her repeated losses and the slow, deliberate act of piecing herself back together. Her work speaks to anyone who has lived through grief or anxiety and searched for meaning in the spaces left behind.
Carol-Anne has written and published two middle grade stories: Memoirs of Faeries (2018) and Secrets of the Quercus Tree (2021). This is her first published article.
Outside of writing, Carol-Anne teaches in primary education, where she finds daily reminders of resilience in the laughter and curiosity of children. She lives in Blackburn, England where she continues to write about the unseen, interior lives of ordinary people.