Kintsugi Girl
From Broken to Beautiful
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending cracks in broken pottery with gold lacquer, leaving the piece beautiful in a different way. This is the story of how I survived a brutal childhood, glued the pieces back together years later, and created something remarkable.
During a difficult time thirty years ago, I coped with life by cutting and burning myself. I couldn’t explain why it worked, so I did what I always do when I don’t understand: research. What I found became the basis of an online network of resources for patients, their families, and their medical providers, work that the author of a seminal book on self-harm called pioneering. In 2012, Armando Favazza said I deserved “a tremendous amount of credit for bringing the problem of deliberate self-harming into public consciousness. His high regard for my work made me happy. I was even happier that he’d stopped calling it self-mutilation.
Also thirty years ago, I was seriously mentally ill, homeless, and in the middle of what would eventually be nearly two dozen hospitalizations directly related to my own self-harm. Despite my struggles, I built a community where people could come together and figure out how to cope without hurting themselves. When life was too much, I used knives and fire to get through. When it wasn’t, I convinced the guy who literally wrote the book on self-injury to see things differently.
My memoir, Kintsugi Girl: From Broken to Beautiful is the story of the complicated path I took from severe child abuse to extreme self-harm to a life worth living. Moving through a multitude of identities along the way – traumatized teen, good Methodist housewife, geek party girl, data manager on a sociological study, homeless mental patient, fierce mental-health activist, and disillusioned wife of a narcissist – I was finally able to make peace with myself.
In between suicide attempts and stints on various psych wards, I created a comprehensive, internationally known self-harm resource, some of which was written when I was homeless. I moderated weekly chats on AOL, started an online self-help community, and participated in a government panel on self-injury. I wrote practical guides, including the still-used Bill of Rights For People Who Self-Injure, for medical practitioners; consulted with authors; gave media interviews; and in 1999 founded National Self-Injury Awareness Day by asking members all over the country to get proclamations from their governors and mayors. It grew so quickly that a few years later, I discussed the phenomenon of self-harm during a March 1 interview on Voice of America radio. In 2007, I stepped back from my advocacy work and let people who are better at it than I am take over.
Today, I’m living a life homeless me never could have imagined. I have a senior position at the software company I’ve been with for 17 years. I live with a husband who loves me more than anyone ever has, and we share a house in Seattle with two demanding cats.