Scars
The
wound is where the light enters you
- Rumi
We sat and
I watched the scar fly back and forth, back and forth. Wildly gesticulating, its triangular
shape, from end to end across the heart line of the palm, it shimmered and
swayed in the noon light. A thickened line, a point of tension with every
movement. The palm would shut and it would disappear, and then with a sweep of
excitement, it would flurry across my line of sight. It would sit there forever
as a reminder of a childhood misdemeanour. A child’s eager curiosity gone
wrong. A baby’s hand met a hot iron. An accident. And to heal it, the doctors
stole away a small piece of skin from elsewhere, with a corresponding scar, and
reattached it to the hand. Transplanted.
Changed. Forever connecting two parts of the one person, twice seen. Twice the
story told.
We all have
scars. Some of them we can see. Some of them sit below our clothes where only
those we trust dearly will ever see. We are all so curious about where they
came from. A physical difference begs the question, “what happened to you?”
I have a
scar on my left knee. It’s big and ugly. Late one Tuesday evening the winter
when I was nineteen, I tripped and fell over. I know it was a Tuesday because I
was heading across from my university campus to the eating district for a snack after debating practice. Debating practice was always on Tuesday. And I know
it was winter because it was cold and raining. Raining heavily, and I didn’t have
an umbrella. But I was hungry and needed something. I was exhausted; it’d
already been a long week and it was only Tuesday. I was wearing a new pair of boots. Winter ones. But
the soles were thin and flat; there was no grip to speak of. And so, on a
bridge of pebbles soaked with rain and a pair of shoes with no grip, hurrying
and trying not to get too wet, I lost my footing. My hands were grazed and my
knee bloodied. I had thick stockings on. I’d only gotten them that season and
the fall tore a little hole in their woollen fabric. My first thought was
“ouch” followed closely by concern that I’d already ruined new stockings and
disappointment in my winter boots for being so dysfunctional in the winter. I
blamed those boots and wore them only once or twice again. They found a new and
much happier home with a good friend, someone less clumsy on their feet on
rainy days than me. How it happened isn’t that interesting. But the healing
process was long and surprisingly painful. I couldn’t get the remnants of
stocking out of my knee and the skin took many months to heal. Every time I took a
step, the scab would rip open again. And so, even in the spring and summer, I
had a nasty wound exposed to the world. For months people would ask, “what have
you done?”
But most of
our scars sit where no-one could see no matter how hard they looked. They sit
in our schoolyard, where it wasn’t a stretch from one monkeybar to the next that we missed
but instead a game of foursquare with people we thought were our friends. It
wasn’t our nose we broke falling from a height but our heart that was broken by
the game we never had. It’s all those opportunities at work we never took for
fear of failure; it’s the loss when we staked our hopes on something doomed to
fail. It’s those nights where our hearts are split into a million pieces and
there’s no one around to help us pick them all up. These are the scars that
shape us.
I carry
little scars for every patient I’ve lost. The ones I know didn’t want to die;
the ones who suffered so slowly waiting for gates to open before them. I carry
little scars for the friendships lost due to time or circumstance. For the
people who were something meaningful and disappear one day without a word. I
carry the scars that we all do for the person we thought we would be but
seemingly we will never become. Because even though we heal from our hurts, we
are changed by those experiences.
Our scars
make us who we are. We suffer, we cry and grieve, but quietly in our own space.
We beat ourselves up and hide away the pain. We let people heal our incision
wounds, the lacerations from breaking glasses while washing the dishes or
removing an infected appendix, but we don’t tell people about our greatest
emotional turmoil.
Why do we
never tell these stories?
These are
the scars that make us. These are the stories we should show while wildly
gesticulating in the afternoon sun. These are the lessons that life teaches. Whether it takes three days, three years or three decades to heal, these are the experiences that make us grow. Our light can only be judged by the depth of our darkness. And our beauty is in our imperfection.
This is the
scar tissue that I wish you saw.
And, as a final note, a quote I read at the Getty Museum yesterday:
If,
again
I have a chance to meet,
there is so much I want to ask
and so much I want to tell.
- Otsuka Chino
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