Scars, by Gillian

We all have them. Don't try to tell me you don't. Nobody gets to our age without them.

The first one I remember acquiring came along when I was seven or eight. Mum and Dad and I were wandering through the woods picking blackberries when a sharp, jagged, end of a broken-off small branch scraped a gash in my thigh. These days I'm sure it would be off to the ER for stitches, with perhaps a butterfly bandage to keep it together on the way, but back then we were expected to suck it up and soldier on; the result being a scar wider than necessary and very long-lasting. I still have it.

Roughly forty years later I needed a butterfly bandage again when I fell on sharp rock edges while backpacking in the Shoshone Wilderness Area, miles from anywhere. But this time I was carefully tended to by my beautiful Betsy, who had the foresight to carry butterfly bandages in her pack.

Back again in the old days, in college, I slipped at the top of some icy steps and fell, with my knee doubled under me, onto the metal blade of a boot scraper. Now that one did require stitches. But that was all it got. These days we'd be given all kinds of physical therapy; exercises to help it heal as efficiently as possible, but in 1959 I was on my own. It hurt like Hell to bend it, so a couple of days later, on a bus, I stretched my leg out beneath the seat in front of me. The bus got in an accident, the seat above my leg came down on it and hyperextended my knee. That hurt like Hell. A week later, with my knee the size of a football, I went off for a long-planned week's hiking trip with a classmate. Well, I was madly in unacknowledged love with the woman! What's a girl to do? Not surprisingly, I have had a lot of trouble with that knee over the years but I've worked hard at keeping it in working condition, mainly through water aerobics. It remains functional, and actually gives me less pain than it did twenty years ago, though I'm not off on any more backpacking or even hiking trips.

A few years back I broke my ankle - just a simple break. It healed perfectly, leaving no scars. Then, as some of you might recall, I broke my wrist a couple of years ago. That was a compound fracture, requiring surgery, nuts and bolts, and a long scar which has now basically disappeared. My ankle and wrist both healed quickly, fully functioning in record time. That, of course, in addition to skillful surgeons, is because I diligently did every therapeutic exercise I was given, painful though they often were. I would like to think that I have become a little less dumb in dealing with injuries, over the years, but much of that is because healthcare professionals know so much more these days. Our job is just to follow their excellent advice.

Which, it seems to me, is much the same for our inner, psychological, scars as for our outer, physical, injuries.

As a child, and even as a student, I had no more idea how to deal with my inner than my outer pains. Neither, come to that, did my parents. All of us colluded in some strange way to pretend I had no injuries, inside or out. Just get on with life, denying the pain. I've written often enough about my childhood angst so I'm not going to repeat it, but I rode roughshod over it just as I did my mashed knee, making both worse while denying there was a problem. Over the years, I have paid heavily enough for that. But, as I gained knowledge and sought expert advise to try to make my knee more functional and less painful, so I did with my inner dysfunctions. Endless physical therapy, endless psychotherapy. Both mostly of the self-help variety, but they worked. The trouble is, it's so much harder to go back; to try to fix those old inner and outer scars years later. Now, I try to deal with both immediately. Keep exercising that wrist, don't let that scar tissue form or I'll be sorry. Take those emotions out and look at them right now. Work them over. I don't want that psychological scar tissue building up, either.

I don't expect to stop receiving wounds, and so the scars that mark them, either physical or emotional. But as I age, perhaps becoming increasingly vulnerable to physical scarring, I hope to balance it with a healthy decrease in psychological scarring. Due largely to my attempts to follow the spiritual path, and in no small part to this group where I find healing by writing out and sharing my problems, my wounds are less deep, less painful, and heal more readily. Little scar tissue has the chance to form. Even those big bad deep wounds don't get reopened as once they did. Those are the ones that are there because I'm a woman. Because I am gay. I am happy about both, but being female or being GLB or T leaves you constantly open to painful slashes of hate-filled sabers. Oh they are not usually directed at me, personally, but I feel the stab of the knife of every woman murdered because she wants an education, or refuses to hide away her body, and of every gay man murdered in Uganda or left to die in Wyoming. It's certainly not that I find any of those horrors less painful, nor, alas, less frequent. I simply, for the most part, recognize the pain sooner, deal with it better, avoid reopening those old wounds.

Yet I am happy to have scars. How can you live any kind of eventful, meaningful, life, and not have them? We are battle-scarred warriors who, having fought the good fight, did not come out unscathed. As Kahlil Gibran puts it,

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

© 30 June 2015 

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.