Kintsugi: Try to find beauty in the broken places, too.

For so long, I’d thought the goal was repairing my shattered vessel so well and so thoroughly, no one would ever be able to tell I’d been broken. 

I could always hold myself together, hide all the pieces that broke off the day I last held my mother’s hand, a confused 8-year-old at her bedside. The pieces that splintered off when my father retreated so deeply into his own shattered self, we couldn’t even find a shard of him left behind. 

I’d conceal each fissure that a cruel stepmother’s words could inflict. I was still trying so hard to be perfect, I’d even keep secret the ironic cracks that the perfectionism was causing.

I wanted to stick back on the pieces of me breaking off uncontrollably, but my fourth grade, glittery-blue Spacemaker toolbox’s Scotch tape and Elmer’s glue were no match for the fragments I’d become. But I kept at it anyway. As quickly as pieces of me were snapping off, I’d patch them back on. 

The deepest fractures were always caused by loss, which came again and again: at 18, having no grandparents left after losing my mother’s mother to the same disease that claimed my mom, and at 20, the news that my brother was gone because he just couldn’t take the cracks any longer. 

I was forever cracking, forever hiding. All this time, trying so hard to fit all my broken pottery inside the dingy gray box of religion, hoping it would hide my mess, the dust I was tracking everywhere. But the first step to finding gold was realizing I had to dump that box out on the floor, causing more breakage before I could hope to repair any of it. 

Wounded, I then allowed a man to sweep my rubble into the dustbin of a doomed-from-the-start marriage that I hoped would make me a whole person. I blamed him for the way I was after that, but I see now that he only happened because of how broken I already was; he so easily oozed right through the all cracks in my heart.

After he moved out, I finally allowed myself to date the woman I’d been infatuated with for months. And when she didn’t hide behind Scotch tape, when I watched, mesmerized by her dainty hands drawing out her pain on paper, I started wondering if maybe my broken edges could be allowed to show, too. Maybe they were what powered my frenzied all-nighters full of paint and music and feeling. Maybe those same edges were helping me see that the broken places are also beautiful, in their own way. Maybe It would feel better to peel all that old glue and tape off, replace it with something stronger and more beautiful. 

I’m still putting myself back together again, still sifting through the rubble, but I’m starting to believe there might be a better way than Scotch tape and Elmer’s glue — maybe those cracks in my heart of glass should be honored, highlighted, gilded, filled in with gold.