Wonderful Zee wrot an amazing article about broken creatures. She captured it perfectly!
This is what I commented: Broken creature feel like aliens: misunderstood and isolated. They lost themselves since they tried to fit in. But there was so much to fit in and therefore the parted in pieces. Now – as you wrote – fallen apart they try to put their pieces together and hide them behind a thick wall. Until that very moment they find out that nothing was broken about them. The broken parts where the shell that never belonged to them but set free the being they denied for so long…… been there!