“Throw it away,” said the mother.
“Why?” asked the daughter.
“It’s broken.”
“But it’s beautiful.”
“Broken things should be thrown away, not treasured.”
“That’s the beauty of it. Despite being broken, it’s still beautiful.”
There is an ancient Japanese art form known as kintsugi, where broken pottery is mended with lacquer dusted in powdered gold. Rather than hiding the cracks, kintsugi illuminates them—tracing the fault lines with shimmering brilliance. The philosophy behind it is simple yet radical: breakage is not the end of something’s worth, but a part of its story. The damage is not erased, but integrated, celebrated, and transformed.
In many ways, our lives mirror this art.
We are all, at some point, broken. By betrayal. By loss. By failure. By the slow erosion of certainty. Trust fractures when promises are broken or when silence replaces what was once connection. Relationships splinter-not always loudly, sometimes in the quiet distance that creeps between people who once knew each other like mirrors. Dreams, once vivid, crack under the weight of reality.
Yet still—and this is the miracle—we rebuild.
We find ways to gather the fragments of ourselves and begin again. Maybe with a gentler hand. Maybe with more caution. But often with greater strength. Like gold running through ceramic, the scars remain visible, but they shine-testaments to what has been endured and remade.
A relationship mended after rupture may never return to its original form, but it can deepen. It can grow into something rawer, more honest, more tender. Trust, once shattered, takes time and grace to rebuild—but when it is, it can become stronger, not because it forgets the break, but because it remembers. Because both people choose to stay, knowing what it takes.
And dreams? Sometimes, the shattering of an old vision is what clears the way for something truer. Something that fits who we are now—not who we thought we should be.
We live in a world obsessed with perfection. Smooth surfaces. Untouched narratives. But perfection is sterile. It does not hold. What does hold—what endures—is resilience. And resilience is born in the breaking. In the healing. In the choosing, again and again, to patch ourselves with gold.
The art of cracks
Being broken is poetic when you’re in it.
It’s not golden veins or elegant metaphors. It’s the silence that screams. The nights that stretch longer than your body can hold. It’s the feeling of watching something you love fall apart and knowing—you can’t fix it the way it was. That you can’t un-hear the words. Can’t un-feel the pain. Can’t unknow what now lives inside you.
Those tiny, silent cracks make it easier to see the inner you—the parts you keep hidden, even from yourself. They place you on a pedestal of honesty, where it’s impossible to look away from the truth: the loneliness, the sadness, the aching weight of being. But those cracks do not make you weak; they make you whole. Without warning, they strip you bare and leave you in your rawest form—the version of you that emerges only in the hush of night, when no one is watching.
Because just as silence is loudest after midnight, so too is the truth of who you are. Not the one you show the world—but the one who stares into the dark, and still chooses to stay.
The cracks—those uneven lines, some chipped off, some halting halfway—these are the contours of your life. They are the very essence of who you are. Every line, whether it leaves you tethered, a bit broken, or barely stable, is part of your journey. It’s not the smoothness that defines you, but the marks left behind from the battles fought, the love given, the losses endured. So wear them with pride, as a testament to the strength in imperfection, something only you and those cracks truly understand.
Mending with Gold
There is quiet power in choosing to repair what others might discard. In a world that worships perfection and disposability — quick fixes, new replacements, clean slates — it takes courage to stay. To look at something fractured and say: This still matters. This is still worth it.
When trust is broken, it’s easy to turn away. Betrayal stings in places we didn’t even know existed. But if both hearts are willing, rebuilding can create something far more profound than the fragile innocence that came before. Trust rebuilt is trust tested — trust proven. It carries the weight of what almost ended it, and the grace of what saved it.
Relationships, too, are not meant to stay untouched. They will bend, sometimes break — under miscommunication, distance, unmet needs, or the passage of time. But if there is love still flickering, mending is possible. The cracks might still show, but they can be filled with gold — with understanding, empathy, and an honest apology. A relationship that has survived a fracture knows something unbroken ones do not: how to come back.
And dreams? Dreams are fragile things. They often break not all at once, but in pieces — chipped away by fear, fatigue, or failure. But broken dreams can be reimagined. They can evolve. Sometimes the dream we lose makes room for a vision that fits better, deeper, more true to who we’re becoming. A broken dream is not a dead end; it’s a turning point. The gold is in the reinvention.
So let your brokenness be your badge. Let it shimmer through every scar, every silence you turned into strength, every second chance you dared to give. Life was never meant to be smooth. You were never meant to stay the same. The cracks are where your story lives—not perfect, but honest. Not untouched, but deeply human.
And maybe, just maybe, you are not broken after all.
Maybe you are becoming.
Every time you chose to love again,
every time you stayed when you could have walked away,
every time you stitched your dreams back together in the dark —
you were not breaking,
you were gold-painting your soul.
Let them call it damage. You’ll know it as design.
Let them see the cracks. You’ll know what’s poured between them —
hope, grace, fire, resilience.
Because you are not the wound.
You are the beauty in the broken.
“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.”
~Dostoevsky
For more content, check out Her Campus at MUJ.
And if you’d like to explore more of my world, visit my corner at HCMUJ — Yastika Chauhan