Beauty in the Scars

It seems like this has been a year of loss for many I know. I’ve had friends lose family members, seen relationships fracture, had a contact lose a job they’ve had for quite some time suddenly. It’s been a year.

This has been a year of me trying to put it all back together again. I’ve battled feelings of loneliness which sometimes teetered into depression. I questioned my worth due to past relationships not working out. I’m still trying to kill some old bad habits of mine. On the flip side, I’ve started to reclaim myself again, trying to be more authentic for myself. I’ve learned silence and solitude is a good thing sometimes. It’s tricky trying to accept less when the world around you seems to want more all the time.

I’ve become familiar with the Japanese art of kintsugi recently. Kintsugi is basically the idea that when something breaks, you don’t try to hide it. A vase falls off a table and shatters, but you don’t discard it. You fix it, but you let the cracks show. You even highlight them. Gold in the seams instead of pretending nothing ever happened.

I keep coming back to that because it feels honest. Nobody gets through life without breaking a little. Things fall apart. You carry stuff longer than you planned to. And the goal isn’t really to go back to how things were before—because that version of you doesn’t exist anymore anyway.

Kintsugi feels like permission to stop chasing “unbroken.” To accept that being put back together—carefully, intentionally—is enough. The cracks don’t disappear. They just become part of the story. And sometimes, if the light hits right, they’re the most interesting part.

This doesn’t mean that the shit that happens to us doesn’t hurt. But there’s a future to be had as we work through things. Sometimes we’re far more beautiful on the other side than we were before.