Yesterday, I walked into a café where multiple events were happening at once. I was happy to join anything, so one of the attendees invited me to a Kintsugi workshop—the Japanese art of repairing broken objects with gold.
I was late, so my cup hadn’t arrived yet.
The host warned us not to break the cup into too many pieces, because then it wouldn’t be fixable. One person ignored that and shattered theirs into 20–25 pieces. He looked at it and said it wasn’t fixable. Everyone agreed.
Since my cup still hadn’t come, I said, "Give me that one. Let me try."
That’s when the real metaphor began.
You can’t choose how something breaks you, or how badly it breaks. You don’t control the damage. You only decide whether you try.
And when you do try, you can’t just randomly pick pieces and glue them together. You start with what feels fixable—the larger fragments. Even then, you don’t glue them immediately. You bring them together, hold them in place, test how they fit, take them apart, and repeat. Only when it feels right do you commit.
Then you move to smaller and smaller pieces. Same process: assemble, separate, reassemble, then fix.
Slowly, the cup started taking shape. Eventually, it looked complete.
But there was a catch.
Seven or eight tiny fragments were still left. I tried hard to place them, but some no longer fit. Some belonged to a sequence I had already missed. I couldn’t fix them all.
Later, we were given extra material to fill those gaps. That’s when it clicked.
This is how we fix ourselves.
We begin with what’s fixable. We hold things together without fully committing. There’s a phase where pretending to be fixed isn’t cheating—it’s part of the process. We break apart, collect ourselves again and again, and only then do we start gluing things in place.
And even after all that, some parts of us are still lost.
That isn’t failure.
We let them go. We fill the gaps with something new. And instead of hiding the cracks, we highlight them—because they tell the story.
That’s why I wasn’t gentle while painting the gold. I made the cracks louder than they were.
They deserved to be seen.