A bowl, beautiful, cyclic, whole, slips through fumbling fingers, hits the floor, breaks in two or three or seven. No longer perfect. Broken.
A girl, beautiful, rounded, whole, slips through her loved ones’ grasping fingers, shattering on the sharp edges of her insecurities, of the world’s expectations, of the rejection of another. No longer perfect. Broken.
In the eyes of contemporary Western society, the broken bowl is now useless.
We have cultivated a culture of disposability.
If it breaks, throw it away and replace it. No big deal. It matters not the history of the item, the beauty of the item, the purpose of the item. Due to this pervasive attitude of apathy toward the inherent value of our things, many people have begun to internalize the message that people ought to be treated in the same way. College drop out? Useless. Divorcee? Passionless. Mentally ill? Unsavable. Unloveable. Broken. Useless. Broken. Useless.
Fortunately, there is an opposing Eastern belief system, a value of reworking and remaking. In Japan, there is a concept known as “Kintsugi,” which is itself a smaller conceptual nesting doll of the value of “wabi-sabi,” or a calm acceptance of the ephemeral nature of life. Sigh. Oh, Japan, how I adore you. While wabi-sabi is quite nice, I find the concept of Kintsugi to be the most lovely of them all. Kintsugi is a practice of taking cracked bowls and other broken pottery and mending them with an amalgam of liquid gold and powerful glue. Not only does this loving process make the pottery stronger than it was prior to the breaking, it also lends it a special kind of beauty.
As I go through life, I have come to believe in this concept, deep to my core. I have internalized it and incorporated it into the way I view myself and others. My life has been a coalescence of opposite experiences.
My childhood was idyllically dreamy; at sixteen, my best friend was killed.
I derived great satisfaction out of the university experience; those were some of the most miserable years of my life.
I have always had a love affair with food; I have always had a hate-affair with my body.
I fell in love with a boy, beautiful from the inside-out; he couldn’t love me in the way I needed him to.
I love the idea of new adventures; I am often paralyzed with anxiety over stepping out of my routine.
In their own ways, each of these negative experiences hammered jagged cracks through the middle of my being. I have been the girl in a heap on the floor, sobbing, unable to imagine life beyond that singular moment of pain. I have been the girl, walking through the world with dead eyes, intentionally shutting off my nerve endings to avoid pain. I have been the girl, stuffing my face and the girl denying my hunger for food in favor of hunger for a smaller pair of jeans. I have been the girl, unable to swing my legs off the side of the bed to face the world, calling in sick to work when really my nausea was caused by an anxiety rooted so deeply in my core that I have no tools with which to wrench it out.
What would our culture say of me, of this pathetic, crying, numb, anxious mess of a person? A girl, broken.
But what of Kintsugi? What of using gold to mend the broken places? What of stitching oneself back together and moving on, regardless? What of using the heart-shattering pain of grief and loss to express, to write, to love more deeply?
I believe in the power of transforming one’s most vulnerable and emotionally challenging experiences into lessons for growth, into a core-deep knowing of one’s inner resilience. You are strong and beautiful, not despite your hardships, but at least in part, because of the ways in which you handled them. Your struggles are a part of your story. Do not try to hide them. Dear one, it is okay to carry scars. Wear them with pride; dress them up with a line of gold filigree.
Life experiences may break us, but they need not break us permanently.
A girl, broken. Kintsugi. A girl, stronger and more beautiful than she was prior to the breaking.
Love,
Lola
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