The first time I learned about the art of Kintsugi, I was listening to a woman speak at a conference. Kintsugi is an ancient Japanese practice where a broken piece of pottery is glued back together and the cracks are highlighted with gold. The pot is not hidden. The breaks are not erased. They are honored.
She shared how frustrated she became in her workshop. The glue would not hold. The pieces would not fit perfectly. The gold paint felt sloppy. She felt like she was failing at the art and missing the point entirely. She took the piece home and placed it on her mantle, unimpressed and disappointed.
Days later, she really looked at it. The imperfect seams. The visible glue. The uneven gold. And suddenly she saw her own life in it. Still healing. Still mending. Still becoming. And yet somehow beautiful.
That story stayed with me because it feels like the truest picture of trauma and healing I have ever seen.
We all get shattered at some point. By heartbreak. By loss. By abuse. By betrayal. By relationships that believed in us less than we believed in them. By things we did not deserve. Those impacts break us. But they do not get to define the final version of us.
Healing is the slow work of picking up the pieces. It is learning how to hold them again. It is asking for help when your hands are not steady enough. I never glued myself back together alone. My glue was my counselors. My coaches. My friends. My family. My coworkers. The people who held me in my mess until I could stand again.
And the gold for me has shown up in unexpected ways.
I see it in my tattoos. Each one marks a season of healing. When I am at my strongest, I rarely walk into a tattoo shop. But when I am at my lowest, when life has knocked the breath out of me, I find myself choosing new ink. Each piece marks survival. Recovery. Becoming. The ashes tried to bring me down. The ink reminds me I rose anyway.
The cracks did not disappear. They were highlighted.
And now I find myself in a new place. I am no longer only working on my own healing. I am helping others see the gold in theirs. I get to sit with people in the middle of their breaking and help them gather the pieces without shame. I get to remind them that nothing about their story disqualifies them from becoming whole. Their cracks are not a flaw. They are the entry point for the light.
If you are in a season where you feel shattered, stuck, lost, or unsure how to put yourself back together, you do not have to do it alone. This is the work I now devote my life to. Helping people move from survival into strength. From broken into becoming. From cracks into gold.
Healing is not about going back to who you were before the break. It is about becoming someone deeper, stronger, and more fully alive because of it.
And sometimes, all you need is someone steady enough to hold the glue while your hands learn how to trust again.
