Scars

When I was born, I almost died.  The nurse told my mom I was a fighter.  She said that she could tell because when she held me she could feel it.  I wonder what she felt because most days I don’t feel like much of a fighter.  When I was five, I would take swimming lessons from the local lake. As an adult, I found a report card of sorts from one of those swimming lessons, and in the back, it said “watch out for her, she’ll try anything”.  I wonder what that’s like because most days I have too much fear to even step outside my house.  I spend too much time alone and have perfected the skill of overanalyzing things which in turn makes me socially awkward and left standing on the sidelines. It’s funny how one person can look at you warts and all and see you’ve got fight and feel you have fire and passion to live but it’s so damn difficult to see it in yourself.

I have a lot of scars. The physical ones, the ones you can see, are like tattoos I never asked for.  I tried to get them erased once, a roommate saw them and said “looks like the pattern on Charlie Brown’s sweater”.  I laughed it off but inside I was embarrassed.   My love life is pretty much extinct.  Even the inkling of a relationship brings up fear and anxiety of having to explain these parasites, to have someone wanting to look at me and touch me and not flinch is something I can’t fathom.   I have other scars, one from being on the receiving end of someone not checking the window to see if someone was behind the swinging door before opening it, another from a fall I took while jumping out of a parked car, I even have one conveniently placed on my jugular.  I had a stranger ask me once, “what’s that from?  Did you get bit by a vampire?” I thought it was extremely rude so I told them I was stabbed with a knife and concocted this gruesome story when in reality, it was from the feeding tube that saved my life when I was born…they quietly walked away. 

Then there are those scars you can’t see.  The ones that hurt the most and cut the deepest.  Scars perpetuated by deceit, humiliation, rejection, self-loathing, and the one hurtful thing someone said to you in passing that was followed up with the passive-aggressive “I’m just joking”.  Those are the most dangerous ones.  Physical scars can be covered up, it’s the ones that take root in your spirit, those are the ones that break you and the hardest to let go of. 

And as I’ve grown older, I’ve made peace with these scars.  They are proof I’m a fighter, even more so than the ones you see.  They are proof I’ve got white-hot fire, even more so than the ones you can feel.  They are tangible proof I’m supposed to be here to do great things. I’m far from perfect I don’t want to be perfect.  I just want to be a good person scars and all.