Which Pieces Make You Whole?
Reflections on family estragement and personal discernment
Nine years after my grandfather’s funeral, I decided to try again. I’d recently gotten married, and something in me wanted to believe that this milestone, this new chapter, might soften old wounds. So, on a complete whim, I reached out to my biological family in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, and invited them to dinner at Cooper’s Landing in Clarksville. My mother, my grandmother, and my two sisters. A chance to smooth over whatever past miscommunications had now calcified into silence.
What I discovered instead was that I no longer belonged there.
For thirty minutes, they talked among themselves. It wasn’t hostile, exactly. It was worse: I felt invisible. They discussed family news, shared updates, and laughed at inside jokes I wasn’t part of anymore. When I tried to contribute, the conversation moved around me like water around a stone. My mother refused to acknowledge that I’d married the love of my life, Chris, who just so happened to be a man. She didn’t argue, didn’t object. She simply acted as though I hadn’t spoken. When dinner ended, she bolted to her car without saying goodbye.
As I pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, my older sister leaned through my car window. “I’m sorry for breaking the bond,” she said. Whatever that meant…
I drove away knowing something had shattered, not just that night, but long before. And I faced a question I hadn’t expected: What do you do when the old self breaks apart and not all the pieces deserve to come with you?
The Promise of Gathering
There’s a Japanese art form called kintsugi, which involves mending broken pottery with gold lacquer. Instead of hiding the cracks, the repair makes them beautiful. The breaks become part of the object’s history, its character, its worth. It’s a compelling metaphor for personal transformation, one that’s gained currency in Western self-help circles precisely because it’s comforting. Nothing is wasted. Every fracture shapes us. All our experiences, even the painful ones, become integrated into a stronger, more beautiful whole.
In The Ritual Effect, Michael Norton (2024) draws on this tradition to describe the process of identity reconstruction. When we face major life transitions, he argues, we don’t get to abandon the old and start entirely new. Instead, we pull elements of who we were along with us, even as we pursue a bold new vision for ourselves. “As in wabi-sabi,” Norton writes, “the beauty comes from breaking who we were, gathering the shards, and forging them into a new self, one that’s more meaningful and truer for all that struggle and effort.”
It’s a generous vision of transformation. Hopeful. Inclusive. The kind of narrative that makes personal growth feel like an art project rather than an amputation.
Here’s the problem, though: What if reconstruction isn’t about gathering every shard? What if healing requires leaving some pieces broken?
When Gathering Becomes Hoarding
The wabi-sabi framework tells us to collect our fragments (all of them) and rebuild with intention. But in You Belong Here, Kim Dabbs (2024) offers a different insight: stories need editing, not just collecting. She describes her own journey of self-reclamation, the moment when her partner saw her exhaustion and said, “You need to speak to yourself with kindness. You wouldn’t say those same things to a friend that you are saying about yourself.”
Dabbs realized she’d spent her whole life letting others define her identity. The stories she told herself (about her own worth, her capabilities, her right to belong) had been written by external voices. Now she needed to reclaim her narrative. “Before I could work on the we of community or organizations,” she writes, “I needed to focus on the me. That’s where the work began.”
But editing those stories isn’t simple. Dabbs is clear about this: “The stories we tell ourselves are not easy to edit. Our neural pathways are like muscle memory, hardwired in our belief systems.” These patterns form over a lifetime. If our core foundation is faulty or miswired, unwiring and rewiring become exponentially harder.
This is where Norton’s gentle wabi-sabi promise starts to crack. What if healing isn’t about integration but excision? What if some neural pathways, some foundational beliefs, need to be cut, not rewired?
In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer (2007) addresses this head-on: “No expansion or evolution can take place without change, and periods of change are not always comfortable.” Change challenges what’s familiar to us, what we’ve relied on for safety, comfort, and control. The discomfort isn’t just the breaking itself; instead, it’s the recognition that not everything broken deserves to be repaired.
And here’s where Paul Miller’s (2009) framework in A Praying Life also becomes essential. In his work, he writes about shifting from worry to watching, from trying to control your life to allowing anxieties and problems to bring you towards your own Higher Power in prayer. “Instead of trying to be out front, designing your life, you realize you are inside God’s drama.”
Surrender, in Miller’s telling, isn’t passive. It’s active discernment. It’s the recognition that you’re not the author of everyone’s story, including, sometimes, your own past. You’re participating in something larger, something being written through you, not by you alone.
Reconstruction requires both gathering and releasing, both honoring and refusing, both remembering and forgetting.
Choosing Which Shards to Keep
Standing in the parking lot at Cooper’s Landing, I realized the breaking didn’t really happen that night. It had happened years before, maybe when I came out, maybe earlier. The dinner just made it visible. What was shattered wasn’t the relationship. It was the story I’d been carrying: If I explain myself better, they’ll understand. Family means unconditional belonging. There’s always a way back.
These were the narratives I’d inherited, the neural pathways Dabbs describes. They’d been written over a lifetime of trying to fit, of editing myself down to make room for their comfort, of believing that belonging was something I had to earn rather than something I deserved. Dabbs is right: stories like these aren’t easy to edit. It’s muscle memory. But recognizing a faulty foundation is the first step toward rebuilding on truth instead of longing.
So how do we know which shards to keep and which to discard?
Norton’s framework offers one answer: gather the elements that move you toward “a more meaningful and truer” self. But this requires a crucial distinction, one that wabi-sabi metaphors can obscure. Honoring the past doesn’t mean rebuilding with it.
I can acknowledge that Cooper’s Landing happened. Those relationships shaped me. Growing up in Southern Virginia gave me certain strengths: resilience, adaptability, and a hunger for authentic connection. These are shards worth gathering.
But their narratives about me? What conditions did they place on belonging? The stories that required me to be smaller, quieter, and less visible so they would be comfortable? Those shards don’t belong in my reconstruction. Not because I’m bitter, but because Singer is right: growth requires challenging what’s familiar, even when, especially when, what’s familiar is the oldest story you know.
The pain of leaving pieces behind is real. It’s supposed to be. As Singer argues, coming to peace with pain is essential for transformation. The discomfort isn’t a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a sign you’re doing the hard, authentic work.
There’s cultural resistance to leaving family behind, to discarding relationships that don’t serve your becoming. We’re told blood is thicker than water, that you can’t choose your family, that forgiveness means reconciliation. My older sister’s parting words (“I’m sorry for breaking the bond”) carried that expectation. As if the breaking was something I did by leaving, rather than something they did by refusing to see me.
But Miller’s reframe offers liberation: you are inside a larger drama, not the author of everyone’s story. You can’t control their narrative about you. You can only steward your own reconstruction with integrity. Dabbs had to learn this, too. She writes about needing to “focus on the me” before she can work on the “we” of community. And that self-focus required self-compassion.
Discarding toxic shards isn’t cruelty. It’s kindness to the self you’re becoming.
So what does gathering actually mean, then, if it’s not indiscriminate collection? It means intentional curation. It means asking ourselves a few questions:
What from my past actually serves my future?
Which experiences taught me resilience without teaching me to accept mistreatment?
Which relationships modeled authentic connection rather than conditional tolerance?
Which beliefs about myself reflect truth rather than someone else’s comfort?
Norton’s image works if we adjust it slightly: the gold in kintsugi doesn’t just glue pieces together. It highlights, creates new patterns, and transforms the breaks into beauty. Your reconstruction gets to be selective.
You gather the shards that make you whole: resilience, hope, the capacity for love, and a commitment to truth. You leave behind the shards that keep you broken, their definitions of you, their conditions for belonging, their requirement that you diminish yourself to make room for their fear.
The Reconstruction No One Promised
Here’s what the wabi-sabi metaphor doesn’t prepare us for: transformation requires breaking and choosing. This is harder than the promise suggests because discernment demands judgment, and we resist judging our own past. We want to believe that all our experiences are equally valuable, that nothing is wasted, and that every relationship can be salvaged with enough effort.
The reconstruction that emerges isn’t beautiful just because it’s broken. It’s beautiful because it’s intentional. You chose which pieces make you whole and which pieces (however formative, however familiar) no longer serve the person you’re becoming.
This doesn’t make it easy. The grief of leaving shards behind is legitimate. Take my sister’s comment, for instance. I don’t know if she meant it sincerely or if it was a reflex, a way to shift responsibility. But the bond was already broken, not by my leaving but by their refusal to see me. My reconstruction couldn’t be built on false belonging. It had to be built on truth, even when truth meant acknowledging that some relationships, some narratives, some versions of family needed to stay shattered.
Norton says beauty comes from “forging them into a new self, one that’s more meaningful and truer for all that struggle and effort.” He’s right about the struggle. But the truth he gestures toward (and that Dabbs, Singer, and Miller make explicit) is that meaningful reconstruction requires discernment.
Not every shard deserves to be gathered. Not every break deserves to be mended.
Some pieces need to stay broken so you can become whole.
Trust for Thought
Learning to trust yourself isn’t just about gathering your shards. It’s the harder work of discernment and of choosing which pieces make you whole and which ones keep you broken. It’s the process of accepting that some relationships, some narratives, some versions of belonging need to stay shattered so that something truer can emerge.
👉 What old story about belonging have you been carrying that no longer serves the person you’re becoming?
Further Reading
Norton, M. (2024). The ritual effect: From habit to ritual, harness the surprising power of everyday actions. Scribner.
Dabbs, K. (2024). You belong here: How to make diversity, equity, and inclusion your competitive advantage. Wiley.
Singer, M. (2007). The untethered soul: The journey beyond yourself. New Harbinger Publications.
Miller, P. (2009). A praying life: Connecting with god in a distracting world. NavPress.
Richard Roman
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I think this is what most of us are really doing; and maybe the entire point of life?! Figuring out who we are and what we want to carry forward. Conducting an inventory of where we came from, what shaped us and who we need to be vs. who we really are. Another fantastic piece!