A few years ago, my German Shepherd crashed into my knee while chasing a ball that took the unfortunate path of rolling between my legs. The blow itself was bad enough but when I looked down, I saw blood gushing. After nearly fainting ~ and calling my partner to leave work and take me to Urgent Care ~ we figured out that Niles sliced my knee open with the registration tag on his collar. Eight stitches later, I have a scar to remember it all by.

I also have a surgical scar where a lump was removed when I was 20 years old. Thankfully, it was benign. And then there is the scar above my eyebrow from when I was a kid and Fisher Price dollhouses had pointy edges. After a certain age, it is the rare person who doesn’t have a collection of scars.

In his video Being Kintsugi, Christopher Bramley affirms:

All of us have been broken at some point in our lives. 

Being broken is not shameful. It’s okay not to be okay.

It’s ridiculous to try to hide our brokenness because…. we’re people.

Our past is part of who we are.

We suffer but we can heal.

Breakage and repair are part of our personal history, rather than something to disguise.

Kintsugi is a Japanese art that repairs broken pottery with gold, rendering a new piece that is more exquisite than it was before the break. What I love about the art of kintsugi is that it is not about looking back or hiding the broken places. It is a celebration of scars.

There have been times in my life when I wished my scars away. When I wished there was a magical formula to go back in time and change things for the better. Not so much for my physical scars but my emotional ones. Times when the hurt was just too much to bear. Times when I wanted to wake up and discover it was all a bad dream.

Society tells us to hide our scars – both our physical scars and our emotional ones. Cover them over. Compensate for them. Pretend they don’t exist. Don’t make other people uncomfortable by showing your scars. Never show weakness. Collectively, we use so much energy hiding our woundedness…. And what is woundedness, really, but humanity?

We have all experienced brokenness. We all have been wounded. No matter what we do to hide our scars, we have them. While none of our brokenness is the same, we share in common the experience of being broken at one time or another.

Instead of hiding them, what if our scars can help us connect more deeply with others? What if, instead of shame, we allow our scars to represent strength and resilience, even beauty?  

None of our lives are what they might have been. We’ve all experienced a time when it felt like a part of our life lay in shards on the floor.  

Yet, when we pick up the shards and begin mending them back together, we may find that what is created is as beautiful (or more beautiful) than what we had before. When we allow our scars to be recognized we can stop being ashamed of them and begin to honor what they represent.

I think I’ll keep my scars. I hope you’ll keep yours, too. There’s no going back, after all. When we reimagine our scars as beautiful and life-affirming, as helping us connect with each other, not needing to be hidden but a testament to our full humanity, that is when we begin the process of repair.

If we all – everyone – admitted that we have experienced brokenness and honored our broken places I believe there would be so much more empathy, compassion, and healing in our lives and the world.

After a certain age, it is the rare person who doesn’t have a collection of scars. Our scars tell the story of our pain and our resilience, our despair and our hope. Let’s tell the whole story of our lives. That’s how we fill what is broken with gold.