From Broken to Beautiful: A Kintsugi Reflection for the New Year

January 08, 2026   |    Written By: Dr. Erlange Elisme

The Weight We Carry

As we stand at the threshold of a new year, many of us in the diaspora carry the weight of what broke us in the last one. 2025 has been particularly brutal. Political leaders have belittled us, reducing our stories to lies and our humanity to talking points. Families face deportation after decades of building lives here. Businesses that took years to establish now struggle as customers stay away, afraid to be associated with us. The professional credibility we worked so hard to earn feels fragile. The very belonging we thought we'd secured in this country suddenly feels conditional.

We enter this new year nursing wounds, some visible and others hidden deep within our collective spirit.

But what if brokenness isn't the end of our story?

The Art of Golden Repair

There's an ancient Japanese art called Kintsugi. When a ceramic bowl or vase breaks, artisans don't discard it or try to hide the damage. Instead, they mend it with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The result? Something more valuable than the original. The cracks become part of the piece's history, highlighted rather than concealed, transformed into veins of precious metal that catch the light.

The philosophy is simple yet profound: breakage and repair are part of an object's history, not something to disguise.

What would happen if we approached our own lives this way? What would happen if we, as a diaspora community, embraced this truth?

We Have Stood Among the Fragments Before

This isn't our first breaking.

We are the children and grandchildren of people who left everything behind. Who boarded planes with one suitcase and a heart full of hope. Who worked three jobs to send money home and still managed to raise families here. Who learned new languages while keeping Kreyòl alive in their kitchens. Who became doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, entrepreneurs while never forgetting where they came from.

We carry dual heartbreak in our bones. The ache for a homeland in crisis. The sting of rejection in the country we now call home.

We know what it means to be broken.

But here's what 2025 tried to make us forget: we also know what it means to repair ourselves with gold.

The Weight of This Year

Let's be honest about what this year has cost us. The Haitian-owned restaurant in Brooklyn that's seen business drop by half. The family in Miami separated by deportation orders, children born here crying for parents being sent back to a country they barely remember. The teacher in Boston who's had to explain to colleagues that no, Haitians don't eat pets. The nursing assistant in Atlanta who now hears the whispers when she walks into the break room.

The college student who's stopped mentioning their heritage in class. The entrepreneur whose funding fell through after the political rhetoric intensified. The parent trying to explain to their American-born children why people suddenly treat them differently.

These aren't abstract losses. They're real people. Real families navigating the impossible space between two worlds, feeling unwelcome in both.

In our culture, we're taught to be strong. Nou fò. We're taught to endure. Nou kanpe. To put our heads down and work harder, prove ourselves more thoroughly, smile through the pain. And we do. We wake up every morning and face workplaces that question our competence, neighbors who eye us with suspicion, systems designed to exclude us.

But strength doesn't mean we don't break. It means we know how to gather the pieces, even when our hands are shaking.

Living Between Worlds

There's a specific kind of breaking that happens when you live between worlds. We send money home every month while struggling to pay rent here. We celebrate American holidays while our hearts ache for Soup Joumou on New Year's Day. We code-switch so often we sometimes forget which version of ourselves is real.

And then 2025 came and reminded us that no matter how long we've been here, how much we've contributed, how deeply we've planted roots, we can still be reduced to a stereotype in a political speech. We can still be made into the villain in someone else's story about what's wrong with this country.

The Haitian nurse who worked through COVID, risking her life to save others, now hears rhetoric about how "those people" are a drain on resources. The Haitian contractor who built homes in this community for twenty years now loses bids because clients have "concerns." The Haitian college professor with two PhDs gets asked in the grocery store, "But where are you really from?"

It breaks something in you. This constant proving. This perpetual defense of your humanity. This exhausting work of being excellent just to be seen as adequate.

The Gold in Our Seams

Here's what trauma-informed care has taught me over three decades, and what our own experience confirms: our wounds become our wisdom. The places where we split apart often become the very channels through which light enters and flows out to others.

I've witnessed this transformation in our diaspora community time and again. The woman who faced discrimination in corporate America now runs workshops on inclusive leadership, teaching with authority born from experience. The man who was detained at the border now volunteers with immigration legal clinics, his story giving hope to families in crisis. The young professional who was told she'd never make it now mentors youth, showing them that success is possible even when the system is stacked against you.

The mother who worked as a nursing assistant while sending her kids through college now watches them thrive as doctors and lawyers and teachers, proof that our dreams deferred are not dreams denied. The father who drove a taxi for thirty years while building a business on the side now employs fifteen people, most of them newly arrived, giving them the chance someone once gave him.

Their breaks don't diminish them. Their breaks have forged them into warriors for justice, healers for the hurting, voices for the silenced.

The gold seams in their stories shimmer with hard-won knowledge that can't be taught in classrooms or borrowed from books. They know what it means to fall apart and choose to rebuild anyway. They understand the slow, painstaking work of reassembly when the world keeps trying to scatter your pieces. They carry credibility that comes only through survival in two languages, two cultures, two sets of expectations that often contradict each other.

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What Our Parents and Grandparents Knew

Our parents understood Kintsugi before we had a word for it. They knew how to take the scraps of their shattered dreams in Haiti and make a new life here. How to take the heartbreak of leaving home and transform it into opportunity for their children. How to take the trauma of displacement and make it testimony.

Dèyè mòn gen mòn. Behind mountains are more mountains. They knew the breaking wouldn't stop.

Immigration. Adaptation. Discrimination. Financial pressure. The constant negotiation of identity. The grief of missing weddings, funerals, birthdays back home. The guilt of thriving here while family members struggle there.

But they also knew something the world keeps trying to make us forget: we are the descendants of people who turned bondage into liberation, who transformed suffering into revolution, who alchemized pain into power. We carry that DNA. That resilience isn't just cultural. It's cellular.

We come from gold-repairers.

A Different Kind of Resolution

As we move into this new year, our resolution cannot be to avoid breaking. That ship has sailed. 2025 has made that painfully clear. We will face more political rhetoric. More policies designed to diminish us. More losses. More mountains.

The diaspora experience guarantees a certain amount of fracture. We will continue to live split between here and there, between who we were and who we're becoming, between honoring our roots and growing new branches.

But here's what we can resolve: we will see our fractures differently.

We will stop viewing our scars as failures and start recognizing them as evidence of our strength. We will understand that being broken open by the diaspora experience, by 2025's particular cruelties, sometimes allows us to hold more compassion, more wisdom, more truth than we could when we were intact. We will refuse to let anyone convince us that we are less valuable because we've been damaged, that we are less American because we're also Haitian, that we are less worthy because we carry two countries in our hearts.

The Japanese masters understood something our parents knew in their bones: the repaired bowl, with its golden veins running through the ceramic, becomes more beautiful and more valuable precisely because it was broken. It tells a story. It bears witness. It carries history in its very structure.

We are that bowl. The diaspora is that bowl. Our hyphenated existence is that bowl.

You Are Not Less

If you're entering this year still healing from last year's breaks, you need to hear this: you are not damaged goods. You are not less American because you're Haitian. You are not less Haitian because you're American. You are not disqualified from beauty or purpose or joy or success or belonging.

You are in process.

The gold is being mixed even now. The careful hands of time, community, and ancestral resilience are at work, turning your fractures into something that catches the light. Every crack tells the truth about your survival.

Every seam maps a journey only you could take. The diaspora experience, with all its complexity and contradiction, is creating something in you that wouldn't exist without the breaking.

Your breaks make you irreplaceable. Our collective breaking makes us unstoppable.

The Invitation

This year, I invite you to practice Kintsugi living. Stop hiding the places where 2025 cracked you open. Stop apologizing for speaking Kreyòl in public. Stop making yourself smaller to make others comfortable. Stop comparing your broken pieces to someone else's seemingly perfect surface. Stop internalizing the lies that we are anything less than extraordinary.

Instead, honor your scars. They are proof you didn't let the breaking have the final word.

Let the gold seams shimmer. Let your hyphenated identity be your strength, not your shame. Let your story be told in all its fractured, repaired, beautifully imperfect truth. Let others see that it's possible to be broken and still be whole. To be scarred and still be stunning. To carry pain and still radiate hope. To be Haitian-American and still be magnificent. To belong to two worlds and be rejected by both, yet somehow forge a third space that's entirely your own.

Gather with other broken-and-repaired people. We heal better in community. Support the Haitian-owned businesses in your neighborhood. They need us now more than ever. Mentor the young people who need to see that survival is possible. Speak up when you have the strength. Rest when you don't. Send money home, even when it's hard. Make the phone call to family. Show up for each other at the grocery store, at church, at the community center, online.

Teach your children Kreyòl. Cook the food. Tell the stories. Refuse to let shame silence your culture.

We are not the same people who entered 2025. We are better. More compassionate. More resilient. More clear-eyed about who we are and what we're capable of enduring and overcoming.

Nou La

We are here. Still here. Always here.

The new year doesn't require us to be flawless. It doesn't demand that we choose one identity over the other. It only asks that we keep showing up, gold seams and all, to write the next chapter of our irreplaceable story.

They tried to break us. They have always tried to break us. From the moment our ancestors were stolen from Africa, through colonization, through enslavement, through revolution, through occupation, through dictatorship, through natural disaster, through political instability, through migration, through this moment right now, they have tried to break us.

But we know how to turn fractures into beauty. We know how to mine gold from our own suffering. We know how to stand, broken and brilliant, in two countries at once, and declare to both worlds: M pa p tonbe. I will not fall.

Welcome to your year of golden repair.

Ayiti pa fini. Nou pap janm fini.

Haiti is not finished. We will never be finished.

And neither are you.

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About the Author

Dr. Erlange Elisme is a trauma-informed care leadership and practice specialist with over 30 years of experience as a school social worker. As Founder and CEO of Elisme Consulting Services LLC, she provides training and consulting to organizations committed to healing-centered practices. Dr. Elisme holds certification in Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery from Harvard Medical School, and has completed advanced continuing education in Trauma-Informed Care, Immigrant Mental Health, and Motivational Interviewing. She is a published author, host of the "Resilient Voices" podcast (available in English and Haitian Creole), and a 2025 Gwinnett Chamber Business Excellence Awards finalist. Fluent in English, French, and Haitian Creole, Dr. Elisme brings both clinical expertise and cultural wisdom to her work of restoring resilience in individuals and communities.

Dr.Erlange Elisme, DSW

CEO / Owner & Author

​Website:https://elismeconsultingservices.com

Phone number:678-595-6446

Email:drelisme@elismeconsultingservices.com