Broken, Beautiful, Becoming
Why the most beautiful stories are the broken ones
“We would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays”, Rushdie writes in Knife, and I can’t help but marvel at how disasters are the sculptors of identity. It’s the betrayals, the quiet heartbreaks, the chaotic storms we swore we would never survive, that leave us with sharper edges, deeper grooves, and the kind of beauty that only imperfection carries.
We learn to wear our scars like the medals of a battle no one else witnessed, though sometimes we resent the wounds that taught us strength. Isn’t it ironic how calamity is both teacher and thief? It steals what we thought we needed, only to gift us a sturdier version of ourselves. I sometimes wonder who I might have been without my own catalogue of ruin, but the truth is, I wouldn’t trade the lessons for a smoother story. How boring it must be to walk through life unbroken!
I think of the time I packed my life into a suitcase and left a country I had outgrown but still loved, as one loves a childhood home long after it has shrunk around them. There was no map, no blueprint — just the unbearable weight of certainty that staying would be a slow death. I arrived in Paris many years ago with nothing but my books, my hunger, and a reckless faith in reinvention. The first months were brutal. I was an outsider in a city that owed me nothing, a loneliness so thick it wrapped itself around my bones. And yet, looking back, I see how that very displacement forced me to sharpen my wit, my resilience, my sense of self. If calamity is a sculptor, exile was my chisel.
Every fall carries the seed of reinvention. The job lost without warning, the relationship that unravels, the moment we realise we are no longer who we thought we were — these are the ruptures that terrify us, yet they are also the cracks through which transformation seeps in. It is only in losing our footing that we learn how to walk a different way. Without crisis, without upheaval, we remain stagnant, trapped in the illusion of permanence. But change has never cared for our comfort. It arrives like an uninvited guest, kicks over the furniture of our plans, and forces us to rearrange everything.
Even failure, the specter we spend our lives trying to outrun, is more architect than assassin. Every rejection, every door slammed in our face, every moment of humiliation — these are the chisels that carve out character. The ones who refuse to be dismantled by failure are the ones who eventually wield it as fuel. The only people who never fail are the ones who never try. And what a dull, suffocating existence that must be!!!
Then there are the quiet calamities, the ones we barely register until much later. The friendships that fade without explanation, the opportunities missed because we hesitated, the ordinary moments that, in hindsight, contained the pivots of our lives. We don’t always recognise transformation as it’s happening. Sometimes, it’s only when we glance over our shoulders that we see the patterns, the strange, chaotic wisdom in every loss.
And what of the calamities that are not personal but collective? The upheavals of history, the revolutions, the collapses that redraw the maps of nations and identities. They leave behind devastation, yes, but also renewal. Empires fall so new ideas can take root. Societies fracture so that something truer, something more just, can be built in their place. This is not to romanticise suffering but to acknowledge that destruction and creation are forever intertwined.
Perhaps this is why we are drawn to stories of survival, to characters who rise from their own wreckage. We see ourselves in them, in their defiance, in their ability to endure. We want to believe that we, too, can turn pain into poetry, ruin into renaissance. And maybe that belief alone is enough to carry us through the worst of it. The knowledge that on the other side of collapse, there is always the possibility of something new.
So, no, I would not wish for a life unscarred. I would not erase the calamities that have shaped me, nor trade the bruises for something softer. Because at the end of the day, we are not made of smooth edges and untouched surfaces — we are mosaics of our breakages, stitched together with gold, more beautiful for having been broken. The cracks are not flaws; they are the proof that we have lived, that we have been tested, that we have emerged — not unscathed, but transformed, and in my case unstoppable.
Carved by chaos, refined by resilience, always evolving,
T.
Wow! This piece doesn’t just speak—it roars! Every sentence crackles with truth, and I found myself nodding, underlining phrases in my mind, then screenshotting entire passages, wanting to carry them with me like talismans.
Your writing doesn’t merely describe transformation, it embodies it. The imagery of calamity as a sculptor, of exile as a chisel—these are the kinds of metaphors that linger, that shift something inside the reader. I was especially struck by the idea that failure is more architect than assassin. That single line reframes so much. For me it says EVERYTHING. I think of the times I’ve faced rejection, how I once saw them as dead ends when they were, in fact, detours to something better.
And that final image—of being a mosaic, stitched together with gold—absolutely breathtaking. It reminds me of kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, making the cracks the most beautiful part. You’ve done that here with words, taking life’s fractures and making them gleam.
This essay isn’t just a reflection, it’s a battle cry. Thank you for writing something so electrifying, so fiercely alive!
“ I was an outsider in a city that owed me nothing, a loneliness so thick it wrapped itself around my bones.” Last night, my mother shared her memories of working in Italy as a young woman. She described her feelings of anxiety and loneliness, saying it felt as if the buildings were closing in on her as she walked the streets. Yet, the strength she found to overcome that anxiety and loneliness is the same strength that shaped her into the mother who raised me into the person I am today. You have crafted yet another beautiful piece of writing—a balm for our hearts at the start of this transformative year, which still feels overwhelmingly sad and timid.