Kintsugi: How to repair a broken heart.
Why a heartbreak is possibly the best thing to happen to you.
For all the plebs, like I was until a few years ago, Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken things with gold lacquer. A vase or a bowl that met its demise either at the hands of curious children or a bored cat is resuscitated through this art. The goal here is not to hide the flaws but to draw attention to them. Every cut and breakage is a story etched along the surface of the piece. And with enough time, new stories are added, branches of memories carved into the life of this inanimate object.
Like these broken things, we must incorporate the philosophy of Kintsugi into our lives so that we may repair our broken hearts. Not with gold lacquer, since Google says it is potentially lethal, but with the lacquer of love — now, I will admit that there is more cheese in this here statement than in all of Switzerland, but truth doesn’t need to sound like Paul Newman on a casual Friday for it to be true.
The life cycle of a love story
Two people meet, they are attracted to each other like the opposite ends of magnets. Something unknown pulls them towards each other. It feels magical. It feels special. The cynicism of the entire world cannot pull them apart.
They don’t get it. This is different. We are meant to be together. The butterflies have built ecosystems in our bellies.
And then one day, it’s gone.
It feels like the world has ended. All the joy, warmth and pleasure has now turned to ashes in the mouth. They say a breakup feels like withdrawal from heroin. I have not tried heroin (touchwood) but I have gone through the withdrawals. All of us have. The pain is so great that we vow never to repeat this mistake.
And then one day we meet someone, and we repeat it. Again.
We try to hold back. Make sure we keep the promise we made to ourselves and then somehow, that is exactly what we don’t do.
This time it’s different, we tell ourselves. And if we’re lucky, this time it is. But rarely is that ever the case. Easier to find a legendary Pokemon than to find true love.
The Lie.
‘…and they lived happily ever after.’
Through our adolescence and into adulthood we have been told that there is this special someone out there for us. As though manufactured by the Gods especially for us, to fulfil us, to complete us, to make us whole.
We see this in fairytales, cartoons, novels and movies. We might be inclined to believe that some Machiavellian overlord has been embedding this idea in our brains to sell us Valentine’s Day cards, wedding rings and brownies. But that’s not the case. This desire — to find this fairytale lover — is naturally within us. The Machiavellian overlord simply takes advantage of it.
Why is it naturally within us? Because we are animals. Like any organism we procreate and this feeling of desire is the mechanism nature uses to make this procreation happen.
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
— Albert Camus
This is why relationships seem to die after a while. The cocktail of chemicals in our brain dries out and with it, the passion in the relationship. Perhaps nature expects us to have already procreated by now and it is time to go about our business.
But is that really the case? What about those lucky ones who have been in a relationship for decades? And they are happy. They seem to truly embody the old phrase — ’til death do us part. How come their cocktail of chemicals doesn’t dry out?
There’s a simple answer to this — they are in love, but they are not attached.
Attachment vs. Love
All of us feel attachment from the moment we are babies. It happens out of necessity for a helpless infant trying to cope with the unknown, terrifying world out there.
“Attachment provides the infant’s first coping system; it sets up a mental representation of the caregiver in an infant’s mind, which can be summoned as a comforting mental presence in difficult moments. Attachment allows an infant to separate from the caregiver without distress and explore the world around her.”
— Psychology Today
This attachment helps us process the world as we grow, but once we’ve grown we don’t need it, at least not in the way it manifests in our adult relationships. The world is no longer as scary to us as it was when we were a child, and we now have the skills to navigate it. It may not be easy, but do-able regardless. Yet, this attachment exists. It isn’t necessarily malevolent but like stilettos on an ice skating rink — useless and potentially dangerous.
The attachment makes us run to unhealthy patterns from our childhood in our relationships. We then project what used to be an attachment to our parents towards our romantic partners. And by doing so we put a burden on them that is not theirs to bear.
And before you know it, you’ve booked yourself a therapist appointment and you constantly find boxes of tissues all around you.
What’s the alternative? To love yourself. And unconditionally so while you’re at it. Because how can we know what it is like to love someone else when we don’t know how to love ourselves? Only a plant with deep roots can produce the healthiest fruits.
How do you love yourself? Simple — acceptance. But acceptance isn’t so easy. We must first delve a little deeper into the truth about why we don’t accept ourselves in the first place.
We are flawed as human beings. In our unique little ways. These flaws are what make us beautiful. But these flaws are also the source of pain. Your flaws will irk, annoy or sometimes even make you hated by others. At the same time, it is also what makes you attractive, authentic and original. But rarely do we focus on the good parts because the world has told us that we have to be a particular way to be accepted. So any part of you that does not fit within this prescribed, arbitrary rulebook of the world is cast off, repressed or chained along with the rest of them.
You don’t have to be gay to be closeted.
You end up in a relationship and present a mask to the other person to love. And this other person loves the mask believing that it is the real you. But you can’t wear the mask forever. It gets sweaty underneath. Eventually, you take it off, or it gets forced off when a rough patch hits the relationship. And your partner sees the real you. They feel betrayed and realise they were not right for you, and nor were you, them. And soon, they stop loving you. Not because what was under the mask was ugly and unlovable, but because without the mask, you think you are ugly and unlovable.
A heartbreak forces you to look at the flaws that you’ve been hiding from yourself. This feeling of being adrift and rejected makes you realise that you are not who you thought you were, you are who the world wanted you to be. You are now forced to take a long hard look at your flaws and your core beliefs or be doomed to repeat the cycle.
Kintsugi: Lacquer your flaws with gold
The first mistake that we make when we believe that we accept ourselves is thinking that just because we finally can see our flaws, we accept them. But that isn’t the case. If you take a moment to notice, what happens is that when we see our flaws, our first instinct is to fix them. Like a patch of dirt that has to be scrubbed off an otherwise pristine marble floor.
Ask yourself, is that really acceptance? Now you might be inclined to ask — what if my flaw is that I treat people terribly, or that I am extremely lazy and don’t have any motivation? Should I accept those things and continue to be terrible to others, or continue to be lazy?
That is a valid question. Only a person who is seriously considering a change would ask. The answer is simple. What sort of a person is terrible to others? A person who finds the outside world terrible because the world will attack him or disown her for who they really are. As a defence mechanism, they push others away before they can hurt them. And their behaviour towards others prompts a similar reaction from them. Soon they’re stuck in a self-fulfilling prophecy of their creation. Being terrible to others is not a flaw, it is a symptom of being unable to accept our flaws.
Similarly, what kind of a person becomes lazy? A person who believes that he or she cannot grow. Even if they want to change, a voice inside their head tells them it is not worth it. You’ve done this before and you’ve failed. You’re not as good as the competition. So, why bother? Remember, this voice isn’t your own. At least, not when it was first embedded into your mind. No child ever thinks of such things. The world teaches the child these beliefs and circumstances nail them into their brain until the adult believes it is his or her original thought.
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
— Michael Jordan
The lie is in believing that the thing you perceive as a flaw is a flaw in the first place. Believing that it is something that needs fixing. We secretly judge ourselves and believe that it is acceptance. And the more we judge, the more we are susceptible to the symptoms of the judgements.
Real acceptance is looking at the thing you find ugly, terrible and unlovable and accepting it anyway. It just is. It is neither good nor bad. Like watching a Jaguar rip apart a doe, it isn’t easy to watch, it just is. That is nature. There is nothing good or evil about it. Once we accept this, it gives us strength. What once used to flinch us doesn’t bother us as much, and before you know it, it doesn’t have power over us.
It is only when we unconditionally love ourselves that is it possible to have healthy, long-lasting relationships. Because when you do love yourself truly, you are not closed off from the reality of your relationship. You are not constantly wondering whether the other person loves you or not, and you are not trying to figure out how you must behave so that the other person will continue to “love you.”
You just are, and as a result, you begin to see your partner for who they are. Not your idea of who you want them to be. You are suddenly aware of patterns of disrespect, abuse and indifference that you were normally blind to. Similarly, you are open to the true beauty of your partner. You now have the tools to choose the right person for you, and more importantly, to be the right person yourself.
The reason why it’s so hard to find true love is because we’re looking for it in the wrong place.
“Charlie Kaufman: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald Kaufman: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie Kaufman: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald Kaufman: I remember that.
Charlie Kaufman: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at *me*. You didn’t know at all. You seemed so happy.
Donald Kaufman: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie Kaufman: How come you looked so happy?
Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That’s what I decided a long time ago.
― Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation
Beauty is authenticity. Authenticity is vulnerability. Vulnerability is fearlessness.
A factory can produce over a hundred vases — the same shape, size, colour and sold at the same price tag. There’s nothing different about any of them. But in a hundred years, each one will have experienced a different set of circumstances. And they will fall and break at some point. Once they’re broken, they can either be dusted off and thrown into a trash can, just to be replaced by the next vase, or they can be put back together with gold lacquer. At the end of the hundredth year, if you line all the vases together at the same factory, none will look alike. And yet, all of them are beautiful in their own way. Not because they remained untouched and pristine like they originally were, but exactly because they were broken at some point.
