I am Kintsugi

Here I sit, staring at a blank screen. Unable to put my thoughts to words on paper.  My therapist wants me to write.  She requested that I do so months ago.  I never could figure out how.  My writing is dead.  Something killed that part of me years ago and the past year just put the headstone on that particular grave. 

Eleven months and a few days ago my whole world changed. The sky came crashing down on top of me and I lost myself.  I would say I lost a part of myself by losing him, but I lost the whole of myself. We have been attached at the hip since I was 15 years old.  We have been “James and Ter’esa” for 33 years.  I haven’t known a “me” that wasn’t a part of “us”.  So when he told me he had fallen in love with someone else… I lost myself. 

My therapist said that it was like my life was a stack of blocks all arranged in a beautiful arrangement, and someone picked them all up and tossed them in the air.  As the blocks fall, they land in a whole new pattern on the floor.  It’s still the same foundation of “me”, but it’s been broken apart and needs to be put back together.  At one point she stopped herself as the understanding of what I had been trying to explain to her finally clicked…. There was no foundation of “me”.  All of my formative years and beyond have been built as “us”.  So all of those blocks that are falling down around me and landing in some new, buildable pile…that foundation isn’t mine.  It’s ours.  And that foundation is irreparable. I don’t have a foundation to build on.  I am floating through life right now, rudderless and starved of direction.  I have to build a new foundation; a foundation that is strong enough to build a new ”me” upon.  The problem with that is the materials it takes to build a new foundation of my own are damaged and I’m not sure how to build a foundation out of damaged goods.

I have always been damaged goods.  A secondhand girlfriend, wife, mother, sister, daughter. Now I’m not just damaged, I’m irreparable.  Or so it feels.  I got used to my husband not minding shopping second hand and finally allowed myself to relax and not obsess over him leaving me for a new, shiny, undamaged… someone.  Guess what?  Captain Save-A-Ho found someone else after all.  And part of what hurts is that she’s damaged too.  Maybe we all are.  He is.  But I love second-hand stores. 

Since I learned about Kintsugi; the art of repairing ceramics with gold, I like to imagine that I am repairable.  And that I am a piece of Kintsugi pottery, held together with molten gold.  Maybe with each repair I become more beautiful; more beautiful than that old second-hand version of myself that my husband molded to his hands and heartbeat.  Maybe instead of building a new foundation out of the bricks of my old life of “us” I can build a foundation out of the shards of broken pottery that I have become.