Skinned Hearts And Skinned Knees

"Scars remind us where we've been. They don't have to dictate where we're going."

- Agent David Rossi, Criminal Minds

Scars interest me. They always have. They tell a person's life story. Sometimes they make me laugh, other times they make me cry or bubble over with anger, but they never fail to arouse emotion in me.

I've been thinking about them a lot lately, actually. My own, and other people's. Someone very dear to me has self-harm scars, and several times in the last few weeks I've woken from dreams where I was kissing them better. Kissing them never actually heals them, of course, nor should it. Scars ARE healed tissue, by definition. Most self-harm scars don't need to be healed or removed. They're badges of honour and courage that say to the world: I went through something terrible, and I survived it. Scars only form on living tissue. The very fact of their existence means you survived whatever caused them.

But I've had the dream several times nonetheless.

I've come 180 degrees in the last decade. I used to hate my scarred body, and find it ugly and shameful. I hid my arms, even on the hottest days of the year, and never went outside without a shawl at the very least. I hid my breasts, preferring to wear a bra even when I was in bed with a man. I hid my bikini area - well, I still hide that, but we're getting there. The ones I couldn't hide, I was always conscious of, and was convinced people were staring at them. Sometimes they were. Other times it was just paranoia.

Since I've stopped hiding them, not one single person has said anything negative about them.

There are some that I would get rid of, and hope to have treated when I have the money for laser removal. There are a proliferation of round scars down my spine and in rings coming out of it, from shingles outbreaks. These went keloid, and they get painful often. Occasionally they reopen and get infected, which is a pain in the ass. My whole back is covered in them - a lot of the time they look like moles, or molluscum contagiosum - and it feels rough and scaly to the touch. I'll have these treated when I can, although I worry about another shingles outbreak making things worse.

My arms are covered in rough, hyperpigmented scars from insect bites. Insects love me, and I have that unfortunate kind of skin that scars badly - partially because of my ancestry, partially because of the bacterial infections that run rife in my body (no immune system), partially because I don't have a decent blood supply going to my skin (before the last six months, I basically didn't bleed). I am still self-conscious about these, particularly when I see women with soft, unmarked skin. But I don't hide them. I wear cami tops and sundresses without cardigans in the summer. I wear strappy dresses and halters in nightclubs. I don't look like the other girls, but nobody's ever commented on the difference.

Some scars of mine are more interesting, as they have their own story. The middle finger on my left hand has a keloid scar underneath the nail, where someone ran over my hand when I fell while ice skating as a kid. (The teeth on ice skates hurt, and they carry a lot of bacteria, just FYI.) My forehead has a dimple just right of center, where I was splashed with boiling oil when I was four or five. My bellybutton has several scars around it, the biggest being from where I accidentally stabbed myself in the stomach while sewing a skirt in textiles class.

Anywhere that I grow hair I get blisters and scars, because I'm allergic to my own hair. Yes, this is possible, though rare. I suffer from several autoimmune conditions, and they're probably all related, including the hair allergy. (I'm also allergic to my sweat.) My scalp seems to be okay, and my eyebrows have gotten used to being there, as long as I keep them narrow and tidy, but arms, legs, underarms, stomach, toes, upper lip, bikini area and several other places all have to be kept shaved or waxed or epilated or plucked, depending on the area. Waxing lasts longest, but as nobody has yet developed a system of waxing that gets very short hairs, I usually end up shaving daily, at least my legs, which are the most likely to break out. Yes, every day. It's a nightmare. Several different doctors have suggested that maybe I'm getting a shaving rash rather than allergies, and have suggested I try doing it less frequently. One even made me go several months without shaving. The result was huge, weeping sores around the follicles, that didn't want to heal. By shaving my legs daily I can keep them almost wound-free, but I still get ulcers in the areas that I can't get daily.

I do have one bad hyperpigmented patch on my throat that blisters easily, and scars every time it blisters. It's about the size of a 50-penny-piece, and I acquired it after my larynx was crushed six or seven years ago. This is where I grow a beard, if I allow it to grow. It's exactly at the site where the worst damage was - where his fingernails were - and while I've never heard of skin starting to grow hair after trauma, if it's not connected it's a hell of a coincidence.

I hate this scar patch, as much for the hair as the dark tissue. I've been considering phoning Embarrassing Bodies to see if Dr Christian can take a look at it. I don't have the money to get it treated privately, and my GP doesn't consider it a medical problem.

I have round scars on my breasts and bikini area that resemble cigarette burns. I don't talk about these, not because I'm uncomfortable with them, but because if I told you how I came by them you wouldn't believe me. 

Some have gone AWOL over the years. A long burn on my left outer forearm (iron) and another long burn on my left thigh (hair straighteners) have faded into nonexistence in the last couple years. A beautiful, snake-like line stretching from the inside of my wrist to about two inches below my inner elbow on my right arm (snapped guitar string) has likewise vanished.

The back of my right thigh has the only wound that still causes me plenty of pain. Some of the others get infected and hurt from time to time, but the thigh burns me often, especially in very hot or very cold weather. I don't know what it looks like now - it's a hard place to see, even with mirrors - but I can always locate it by touch with no trouble, as even a light touch causes a small twinge of pain. I think it's possible that there's still a fragment of the bullet in there, and if it ever gets worse I guess I'll have to have it checked out, but for now it and I coexist. I tell people it's in the buttock, and it's high enough on the thigh to get away with that story. "Shot in the leg" shocks people, whereas "shot in the butt" gets giggles.

I was eleven when I got shot. In four more years, I'll have had that scar for fully two thirds of my life.

Huh. Feels like longer than that.

I love and hate the scars of my loved ones. I hate that they were in pain. I love that they survived their pain. Scars, and the pain that goes with them, seem to feature a lot in romance novels. Every tenth book I get from Silhouette or Harlequin seems to feature a brooding hero who hides away from the world because he thinks that his scarred face or missing hand or gammy leg makes him hideous to look at. It doesn't. Ever. It's just skin. It's an organ that's there to hold your insides in and keep dirt and bacteria out. No matter the texture, the colour, the markings on it, differences in skin do not make a person ugly, any more than a defect in a heart valve or fibroids on your kidneys do.

In the case of my friend, his scars are beautiful, because they're his, and he's beautiful.

And so am I, and so are you.