Kintsugi - Your brokenness is golden

I came across a Japanese term called 'Kintsugi' which lead to the inspiration for this post. Kintsugi is a technique in which broken pottery is repaired and then molded together with beautiful golden glue which accentuates the pottery's cracks. 

Imagine if we were our own Kintsugi pottery; every mark on our heart or crack on our body became embellished with a beautiful golden powder.  We have all experienced brokenness, we each have our wounds. Whether through heartache, grief, illness, relationships, identity issues, and so on; they come in many shapes and sizes. Yet we are ashamed of this, we try to fuse ourselves back together immaculately and sculpt an illusion of never being broken. 

There is beauty in bearing our scars.

Our scars are the roadmap of our struggles and our character. Society has associated vulnerability as a weakness. This is false, just look to Brene Brown's research who echoes how essential vulnerability is for connection. 

My father gave me a piece of advice; 'we are all like porcelain dolls sitting on a shelf, until someone knocks us off the shelf then we need to put the pieces back together. We can allow experiences, memories, words, and actions to shatter us, or we can choose to rebuild ourselves.' Brokenness does not have to shatter us; we can rebuild. We may not be the same person we were before we were broken, but who we are now is enough. Peel away the layers of false personas. 

Hemingway once stated, "We are all broken - that's how the light gets in."  Brokenness is the road to breakthroughs. If we face our brokenness head-on, we no longer waste precious energy attempting to conceal or run from it. Embrace it. Let your scars humanise you. Your brokenness is golden. 

- Han