La belleza de las cicatrices

I was born broken. In the same delivery room I tested positive for HIV. My parents were drug addicts. My grandparents were going to face the death of two daughters -one of them, my mother- and I was going to live with an authoritarian grandfather and a courageous grandmother, but with the consequences of everything that had happened. Years later, everyone would call me a "faggot" at the religious school I attended. The harassment was going to take me to the child's advocate to try to survive that situation that left me unable to go to class for a whole year. When I decided to create my non-profit association, Kintsugi Project, I was inspired by that Japanese art, thousands of years old, which consists of restoring broken ceramic pieces, but with a peculiarity: once the magic of putting all those pieces back together, the cracks are covered with gold, thus creating a unique, new and irreplaceable object. Kintsugi is my model of life, my philosophy. All of us are pieces of ceramic that, sooner or later, we break and we have to learn to see the beauty of the scars and rebuild ourselves by hand, with empowerment, strength and brilliance.