What I See When I See You

There was a moment at an ATM that I have never forgotten.

I was going through a bankruptcy. Not the kind you read about in business pages, the personal kind, the one that strips everything down to the question of whether you can feed yourself and your family today. I had a credit card I hoped still had something on it. Enough for food. I walked to the machine the way you walk when you already half-know the answer but need to look anyway.

Standing there before me was a young woman. Late twenties. A mother, I could tell. She was staring at the screen with an expression I recognised before I could name it, the specific stillness of someone receiving bad news they already expected. The balance Zero, or close enough to it that the difference didn’t matter.

I saw myself in her face completely.

The desperation. The quiet fight not to fall apart in public. The calculation happening behind the eyes, what now, what next, how do I make this work when there is nothing left to work with?

I wanted to give her everything I could in that moment but had nothing. Not a coin, not a word that would have been enough, not anything that could have reached across that distance and made it smaller.

All I had was a gentle smile.

I don’t know if she saw it. I don’t know if it meant anything. But something happened to me in that moment that I have been trying to understand ever since.

That was Italy. Years before the life I have now. Before the decision to leave everything behind and start again on the other side of the world. Before the work, the coaching room, the people I would eventually sit across from. I was not yet the person who could help anyone. I was still becoming him, slowly, painfully, without knowing that’s what was happening.

I saw the cracks. In her, in myself, in the particular way that human beings fracture under weight they were never designed to carry alone. I saw the raw edges of a life under pressure, the places where the surface had given way.

And I also saw something else.

I saw the light of the fight. The refusal to surrender that was visible even in her stillness. The presence of something that hadn’t broken even when everything around it had. I don’t know what you call it, resilience, spirit, grace, or God. I know what it felt like. It felt like gold.

I have been fascinated by Japan for a long time. The way Japanese culture finds meaning in simplicity, depth in restraint, beauty in what other cultures discard. Ichigo ichie ‘this moment, once, never again’, Ikigai ‘the reason you get up in the morning’, and Kintsugi, the ancient practice of repairing broken ceramics not by hiding the cracks, but by filling them with gold.

The philosophy behind it stops me every time.

We live in a world that breaks things and throws them away. Objects, relationships, people. We are taught, quietly and persistently, that broken means finished. That a crack is a flaw. That what has been damaged is worth less than what has not.

Kintsugi says the opposite.

The crack is where the binding starts. The repair is not a cover-up, it is an addition. The broken piece becomes something it could not have been before it broke. More beautiful. More honest. More itself.

I think of that woman at the ATM. I think of myself standing beside her with nothing in my pockets and something opening in my chest that I didn’t have a name for yet.

I think of every person I have sat across from in a coaching room since then, and there have been many, each one carrying their version of that moment, that screen, that stillness. Each one cracked in their own particular way. Each one holding, somewhere inside the fracture, a light that had not gone out.

That is what I see when I see you.

Not the crack. Not the damage. Not the version of yourself you’re ashamed of or the years you feel you’ve wasted or the choices that brought you to the place where you finally asked for help.

I see the gold in the binding, the strength that comes not despite the breaks, but through them.

I see a vessel that has been broken and is still here. Still fighting. Still becoming.

We are not less because we have been broken.
We are more, because something in us refused to stop becoming.

That is why I do this work. That is why this space exists.

My high school teacher told me at graduation not to pursue writing. I am writing anyway.
And even as I was already sitting with other people in their darkest moments, trying to help them find their way, I was still, quietly, finding my own.

And I feel that maybe that is the only qualification that matters.

And if you are reading this carrying your own cracks, I want you to know, you are not finished.
You are not a flaw. You are not something to be discarded.

You are mid-repair.
And the gold is already going in, whether you can see it yet or not.

I wonder sometimes how many of us walk past each other carrying the same unspoken things.
If this touched something in you, I’d love to know what it was.