Eight years ago in 2007, I was scribbling down in my diary the tragedies of being in eighth grade. Seeing me in distress, my best friend took the diary from me and wrote in it a lyric from a song.

“Excuse me, too busy. You’re writing your tragedy,” she wrote.

The line fit the moment perfectly. She then talked about how the song, “Let Go” by Frou Frou, conveyed the idea of beauty in failures. “There’s beauty in the breakdown,” it said.

That’s when I was first introduced to the notion of suffering being beautiful. This idea was reinforced when I read Paulo Coelho’s “Eleven Minutes” that summer. From sadism to masochism, what really struck my teenage mind were Coelho’s words on exercising. We’re not satisfied until the lactic acid produced in our bodies makes our muscles ache and tells us we’ve done some good damage. That is, we find satisfaction in putting our bodies through pain. We wouldn’t know we’ve moved forward unless we’ve suffered, unless there’s evidence we’ve pushed ourselves beyond the ordinary.

Some years later, I came across the Japanese art, kintsugi, somewhere on the Internet. Watching The Nerdwriter video, “Kintsugi: The Art of Embracing Damage,” last month brought it back to my recollection. Kintsugi, the practice of repairing broken crockery with lacquer mixed with gold, is a way of celebrating the broken and embracing the broken as more beautiful than the pristine. It follows the principles of the Japanese aesthetic Wabi sabi which dismisses the ideals of symmetry and perfection.

Wabi sabi is based on the Buddhist teachings of the three marks of existence: impermanence, suffering and insubstantiality. Growing up, we fail and get rejected, and some of us somewhere in between learn to run away from suffering. We protect our hearts from breaking. We shy away from vulnerability. We hide ourselves in our homemade cocoons because we can’t see. We can’t see that the cracks in a piece of crockery speak of its journey, and its breakage isn’t its end. Our own physical scars have a story to tell. The wrinkles etched on our faces speak of our personal odysseys: Our worries are etched on our foreheads, our smiles and laughter on the corners of our lips and the days we squinted, waiting for the bus in the sun, on the corner of our eyes.

I’m attracted to the broken, the hurt and the tainted. There’s something beautiful in suffering that I connect with, the humanness of it all. I suffer, which is why I can connect with you, because you suffer.

Suffering gives us compassion. It breaks us out of our own bubble and tells us there’s a whole world out there that suffers just like we do. The oxytocin produced during moments of distress make us crave for human connection and help others who are suffering just like we are.

Artists turn their suffering into aesthetic pieces of art, creating art out of pain. Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, portrays the melancholy he felt walking down a road with two friends.

“I was walking along the road with two friends — the sun went down — I felt a gust of melancholy — suddenly the sky turned a bloody red,” Munch wrote in his diary in 1892. “I stopped, leaned against the railing, tired to death — as the flaming skies hung like blood and sword over the blue-black fjord and the city — My friends went on — I stood there trembling with anxiety — and I felt a vast infinite scream (tear) through nature.” 

I do a lot of writing when I feel intensely negative emotions. After dwelling in the pain for a while, I read my written word and think to myself, “This is so beautiful.” Because preserving pain in something more long-lasting than the fleeting pain is beautiful. There’s grace in the damaged, the broken and the hurt.

So embrace suffering. Let its beauty consume you. Let it fill your heart and beautify it. Let it fill your wounds with gold, and let it transform you. For if suffering is inevitable, there’s no point in denying it.

Rhytha Zahid Hejaze is a sophomore studying journalism at Northwestern University in Qatar. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].