Kintsugi and The Art of Self Love
Years ago when I was in Venice, Italy, I purchased a small stained glass magnet as a souvenir. It was of a man riding a gondola, his arms and torso slightly bent forward as if he were mid-paddle. The trinket went up on my fridge back home, and every time I saw it I’d remember those lazy afternoons walking along the canals, stopping for wine and cheese at quaint cafes on the water.
One day about a year later, I went to open the fridge and my elbow bumped the magnet, sending it crashing to the floor. The glass shattered, splintering into tiny pieces and skidding across the kitchen tile. I retrieved what I could—a decapitated head, bits of broken limbs, slivers of glass—and placed it on the kitchen counter, wondering what to do. I had too many fond memories of Venice to simply throw the pieces away, but gluing them back together seemed out of the question. Undecided, I ended up stashing the fragments in a small box that sat on my dresser for weeks.
Eventually, I threw out the broken pieces, although months later I regretted it. That was when I heard of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer. Kintsugi, which roughly translates to “joining with gold,” is about taking something that’s broken and making it whole again, all the while celebrating its imperfections.
The technique is part of a broader Japanese philosophy called wabi-sabi, which appreciates beauty that is imperfect, flawed, or transitory. It teaches us to find beauty in our fault lines, to find meaning in our scars. It teaches us that when something breaks, it becomes more valuable, not less.
When I discovered kintsugi, it was too late to apply the philosophy to my broken gondolier. Although in retrospect, I wonder what it would have looked like, all those golden veins stretching across the length of his body. Glass and gold all intertwined into one, making it more beautiful than before.
All of this got me thinking how we’re a bit like broken pottery, our wounds sutured with gold. Each of us a unique mosaic of broken pieces, put back together and remade into something new. It got me thinking about all the ways we become by unbecoming.
Yet unlike with kintsugi, we go through this process of breaking and repairing over and over again—perhaps thousands of times throughout our lives. It means we discover ourselves bit by bit, the way a sculptor might unveil her masterpiece, slowly chipping away at a block of stone to find the shapes that were hidden underneath all along.
This process takes time, like the building of mountains. When you look at a place like Yosemite, you don’t think about the years it took to make it beautiful. You just see the vast expanse of trees and free-flowing rivers and towering granite cliffs. It’s easy to forget it took years of water carving through rock to form its peaks and valleys. You forget that the land was severed, molded and remolded, that it expanded and retracted for centuries in order to become what it is today.
We forget that we, too, are mountains. That we are in a constant state of flux, perpetually being shaped and reshaped, broken and remade. Our wounds and edges, once sharp and jagged, eventually become worn down and smoothed out by time, transforming into something sublime.
Kintsugi teaches us that this process isn’t always easy—in fact, it rarely is. Sometimes beauty needs the most inhospitable environment to bud and bloom, to take shape. We find this lesson time and time again in nature. A lotus flower can only grow in the murkiest of mud. Shards of broken glass need to be worn down by the sea to become smooth sea glass. Pearls are formed by irritants that make their way into the oyster shell; so it’s grit that makes the pearl, not perfection.
Through kintsugi, we come to realize that imperfections are not only inevitable, they are necessary. Any work of art—which all of us certainly are—cannot be complete unless we are embellished with our flaws, unless we have found greater strength in them.
It has taken me a long time to learn that beauty comes from wear and tear, from time carving stories into our bones. It comes from grit making its way under our shells, until something rare and precious is formed. It comes from loving ourselves not despite our imperfections, but because of them.
I know from personal experience this is hard. I’ve been focusing a lot on self compassion lately, on being aware of the way my inner critic rears her ugly head. And yet, there are still days when I feel like that glass gondolier, all bits and pieces in need of repair. The truth is, I’m still learning how to be okay with breaking, how to love my fault lines.
Today is Valentine’s Day, a day when we celebrate our love for the people in our lives that matter the most. This year, I’m adding myself to that list. A little reminder to love all of myself, even the parts that are flawed or imperfect. No, let me rephrase: especially those parts.
Because in the end, maybe our imperfections aren’t the places where we need to love ourselves less, but rather where we need to cocoon ourselves in more self compassion. Maybe those are the cracks where we need to fill in and fortify with gold. Because maybe it’s precisely this golden scar tissue that makes us whole in the end.