The gold we add

There’s this Japanese art form called Kintsugi.

When a bowl or cup breaks, instead of throwing it away, it’s pieced back together. Not with glue meant to disappear, but with gold. The cracks aren’t hidden. They’re honored. They become part of the story.

And suddenly, the object is not just whole again ... it’s more valuable than it was before.

I’ve always loved that idea. The philosophy behind it.

That something broken can become more precious. That the repair is not a flaw, but a feature.

We live in a world that doesn’t work like that anymore. Things are made to be replaced. Phones, furniture, even relationships ... all designed with a quiet ticking clock in the background. Use, discard, upgrade. Repeat. We’re told to keep things shiny. Smooth. Untouched.

But people don’t work that way.

We break.

Sometimes quietly, sometimes all at once.

And when we do, we’re faced with a choice:

Patch it up in secret and pretend nothing happened …

Or lean into the gold.

And by gold, I don’t mean anything flashy. I mean healing in a way that adds something to who we are. Not just bouncing back, but coming back with something richer. Something that holds.

That gold might look like therapy. Like self-reflection. Like the long, slow process of forgiving. Of learning. Of finding a gentler way to speak to yourself. Of pausing long enough to really feel the cracks before you fill them.

And what we don’t talk about enough (not really) is that this healing process? It can be beautiful. Not just the end result. But the act of adding the gold. The care. The artistry. The quiet tenderness with which we tend to our broken pieces.

Yes, it hurts.

Yes, there is grief, and loss, and the ache of not being who you once were.

But from a little distance, from the other side,

sometimes you can look back and see it differently.

You see the way you grew.

The softness that came after the storm.

The new shape of your life, glinting slightly where the light catches the gold.

When I look back on the hardest seasons of my life, I don’t feel just pain. I feel gratitude. A bittersweetness. A strange kind of affection for the road I walked to get here.