(Part three of the cat saga — and the golden thread of healing)

 

After the court ruling, things did not exactly return to normal.

Tinsel became a tabloid icon. My cousin stayed furious. The widow disappeared. The rest of us? We tried to act like we had not just witnessed the most bizarre family fallout involving love, loss, and feline inheritance.

Something in me had shifted, though.

Watching it all unfold — the fractured relationships, the viral absurdity, the way grief twisted into gossip — I felt something quietly break inside; not in a dramatic, table-flipping way, but I realised that judgment, pride, even legacy are all just porcelain. Beautiful. But brittle.

I needed to make sense of it all – of the cracks it revealed — in my family, yes, but also in me.

And that’s when Kintsugi found me.

The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold; not to hide the damage, but to highlight it — to honour the break, and make something stronger and more beautiful in the repair.

It spoke to a truth I had yet to put into words: that healing isn’t neat. It’s messy. Slow. Sometimes public. Sometimes quietly viral – like a cat with a trust fund. But if you choose to heal with intention, with grace, with gold — you end up stronger. Wiser. Whole… but changed.

That’s when the idea for the #Unshakable Kintsugi Hoodie Dress was born.

It came to me in sketches — seams laced with gold, soft black fabric like a quiet hug. At first, I thought it was just about the saga. A wearable memory of one of the strangest chapters I had ever lived, but then I realised: this wasn’t about Tinsel. This was about me.

Because long before the cat saga, I had lived through my own heartbreaks. Quiet ones. Loud ones. Some funny in hindsight, some still raw; and when I looked at that hoodie dress, I saw my healing — not hidden but honoured. I thought: if I feel this way, surely someone else does too.

So I released it.

Not as a fashion statement, but as a mirror.

For anyone whose healing didn’t come with neat resolutions. For anyone who has patched themselves together with grace, and grit, and a little bit of magic. For anyone whose story — however bizarre or quiet or aching — deserved to be worn like art.

I hoped that when people put it on, they’d feel comforted. Emboldened. Less alone. Maybe they would think about their own cracks — and how they have been mended.

Hopefully, not all of them have a viral cat inheritance to recover from. But I know they have healed from something.

Because we all have.

And while some family drama — about and beyond Tinsel — is still simmering beneath the surface, I often catch myself imagining what that resolution might one day look like. And more than that, I fantasise about the Kintsugi design I would create to celebrate that specific healing — a new thread of gold, a different cut, another wearable metaphor of love restored.

Maybe it will happen.

Maybe it won’t.

But the fantasy itself is its own kind of hope.

Self-Reflection

What’s your healing story?

Can you picture it — not as damage, but as design?

If your scars were stitched with gold, how would they shimmer? Where would they run? What would they say about who you have become?

And if you could wear your healing, what would your Kintsugi hoodie dress look like?

Take a moment.

Close your eyes.

Paint a photo in your mind of your most powerful self — not in spite of your cracks, but because of them.

That’s what Kintsugi is.

That’s what this hoodie dress means.

That’s what being #Unshakable really looks like.

 

‘See’ you next week.

 

Sally Chiwuzie
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IG Handle: @unshakable.is.a.state.of.mind