We all have them. If we've really lived rather than being popped in a protective bubble from birth that is.
I've never really seen the problem or issue with scars. Why some people seem so embarrassed about theirs. But, then perhaps I am slightly different because of what I've seen and done.
Almost right from the very beginning, I was exposed to people that were considered "damaged" in some way. Less than physically perfect specimens.
When Mom returned to work, I was left with an elderly couple. He had had his left leg blown off. He did not let it stop him, though. He was a carpenter by trade, and many was the time I watched him climb a ladder on his one leg with a bucket of shingles in one hand to do roofing work. That was before I even started to school.
When I did start to school, my exposure continued. It was in the early days of "mainstreaming" when they were experimenting with shifting students from the Special Ed classes if they only had a physical handicap with no mental handicap. One was an albino and legally blind. One had been born without any arms or legs, but just nubs where his arms would have been and a vestigial "foot" from his right hip.
Our teacher, needless to say, did not put up with a whole lot of excuses from the rest of us. Not when one was completing his homework despite having to put his nose on the paper to see it and the other was completing it with a pencil in his mouth.
In later years, both were in the band, marching and concert. Patrick rolling along in his motorized wheel chair, playing a specially modified trumpet with elongated valve tops extending to the right for first and third and to the left for second, so that he could manipulate them with his nubs. Jerry a flutist (or flautist elsewhere) that, of course, had to press his nose against the music stand to sight read a new piece, but could play the birds from the trees.
There was also a girl who had pulled a pot of boiling water over onto herself while I was still watching that carpenter climb a ladder with one leg and a bucket of shingles in one hand. Her left forearm was a mass of scar tissue. And, I'm ashamed to admit that at first, that bothered me. A great deal. I was born with an esophageal flap dysfunction and a strong as hell gag reflex. (Not to mention a high empathetic index.) I could not look at that poor girl's arm without doing a T-Rex mating call impression. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, she was sensitive about her arm and wore long sleeved shirts most often. Although, it does make me sad to think that, when we were six, I may have contributed to her self-consciousness. I got over it. So did she, playing on the basketball team in a sleeveless shirt for everyone to see her scars raised high in the air as she "swished" another three-pointer.
I could cite others... but, I don't see much point as they were mostly just further exposure to the same experiences.
But, it was some time before I came to understand that just as we accumulate physical scars on our body, so too do we accumulate psychological and emotional scars. Some worse that others granted, depending on the experiences that accumulated them. But, we all have them. We all come from somewhere.
I met Love. Or, she met me.
Love had her left knee blown out by a shotgun blast before she graduated from high school. This was during a time when there was a pendulum swing away from amputation as veterans were returning from Viet Nam with missing limbs. So, they "saved" the leg. For some definitions of the term. Even doing some of the early experimental vein grafts, I understand. And a lot... a whole lot... of skin grafts. Her entire left leg, which did not bend due to the metal rods they had used to replace the destroyed bone and joint, was a mass of scar tissue from her mid-thigh down.
The physical scars caused some widening of the psychological scars that she had carried almost from birth. The man she settled for to avoid being alone added to the scars on her psyche and on her heart for just slightly less than twenty years.
The thing is... I never saw her as damaged. Scarred? Sure. Inside and out. But, I did not see her as needing to be fixed. I wanted her, all of her, just the way she was. It took a long time for her to understand that I didn't love her despite her scars, both visible and invisible, but because of all of her, including her scars.
After twenty-five years during which I'm sure we each put our own scars on the other, she placed her final mark on my soul, the final scar she would give me, by dying.
I met some other people. People who added to my accumulation of scars, just as I added to theirs. Even as we each helped each other to heal from some past wounds. That, to me, is what it's all about. Picking up our own scars along this gravelled road. Accepting others for the road map of their past graven in their skin, in their heart, in their soul. It's what makes us all perfectly imperfect human.
We all come from somewhere. We are all shattered vases mended with gold. That is what our scars are. The ones on the skin we're in and the ones on the mind and heart inside. The gold that makes us even more valuable to the eyes that can see it.
I don't see what would be wrong with displaying our scars, to display the kintsugi art that we each are. Not to those we trust to see us as such. But, how can we really trust they will see us as the unique work of art our scars make us unless we are willing to show them and see?
And we will pick up scars. If that is, we are actually living rather than hiding in a protective shell, afraid to embrace the pleasure for fear of some ephemeral imagined pain before it even comes. The only question is whether we wear our scars as a mark of a live well lived and don't let them stop us from exploring further, as far down this gravelled road as we dare to go.
Not, of course, while the wound still yet bleeds. But, when the scab has fallen away, leaving another perfect scar to mark the experience? Hell, yeah. Be a shooting star under your scars.
