How Your Scars Make You More Valuable.
I saw a glint of gold as I sat across my long time friend.
We were exchanging our life events, and as he opened up, I saw parts of him I had never seen before. Here is where I finally understood what the art of Kintsugi looks like in a living person.
I’ve known this friend since we were in seventh grade, and I remember.
I remember how invincible he thought he was, how popular and egotistical, how he treated others. I remember his entitlement and how I’d roll my eyes at him because he thought he was the shit.
And now… we had just turned thirty.
We had lived through and seen a lot; and there was something different about him.
Where once was bravado, there was soberness, naiveté replaced by experience, recklessness taken over with maturity, ego exchanged with humility, and entitlement overwhelmed with love and sacrifice.
Those beautiful qualities sometimes can only be earned through battles that leave wounds, but wounds can heal into scars that tell stories of resilience. But the art of Kintsugi takes it further and turns scars into a work of art.
Kintsugi (which means “golden repair”) is the centuries-old Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with a special gold lacquer. This repair method turns these broken vessels to works of art by emphasizing its fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. Kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, the gold bringing more value.
Many of the character traits we wish to develop in ourselves sometimes can only be obtained through hardship; a hardship that sometimes brings us to a breaking point.
And perhaps this is why experience is so valuable and cannot be replaced by anything else, for it is far better to be led by a battle scarred soldier into a familiar maelstrom, than to trust in a naive cadet supported only by ego.
But what takes these scars beyond just a good story of resilience is when you become more self-aware, a knowingness of how to live a better life. The cracks and breaks that become gold are those hard earned lessons that have ripened into wisdom.
This is what I saw in my friend that day. All the mistakes and failures had fashioned him into something richer, something with more substance.
You, my friend, with all your brokenness and scars that taunt you with lies of not being good enough, you with all your shame and feelings of worthlessness because of past mistakes and failures…
Where once stood a solid piece of clay pottery, now stands a work of art with streaks of gold that catch the light, a piece whose value has skyrocketed only because of the fractures holding all the gold.
