Starting Soon, Writing in the Dark's "Essay in 12 Steps" Challenge!

"Given its genre mingling, the lyric essay often accretes by fragments, taking shape mosaically—its import visible only when one stands back and sees it whole." ~ Deborah Tall

I am a broken thing. I know this.

But I am beautiful in my brokenness. I know this too.

These days, almost everyone has heard of kintsugi—the Japanese phrase meaning “join with gold.” It’s become a cliche, a meme, that ever-present photo of the fractured black pot lacquered back together with liquid gold.

But this is precisely what happens if you are abused in childhood—if you are broken, as I was, then heal. The shattering under the weight of my stepfather’s groping and violent hands when my body was three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, cannot be undone. That brokenness is permanent. But the reassembly through healing creates its own stunning patterns, those strange golden lines, radiant and real, hard earned and singular.

Perhaps this is why I love broken things. Shell shards. Glass fragments. Stone chips.

I also love incompletion. Implication. Possibility.

And finally, I love—and I mean really love—the way these bits, when precisely arranged, with enough attention and l…