In a nutshell, I'm a clumsy person and a reckless cook with a pretty important message to share.
I remember, as a child, seeing my friends comparing epic stories of scars and broken bones and never having anything to contribute. I didn't have any scars growing up. I have never broken a bone.
The first major scar I got was while getting out of my mother's car and tripping over the curb. I was on my way to a community-wide meeting being held at my high school and, throughout the event, I bled through the rip at the knee of my jeans. To this day, it's apparent what circle of skin never healed quite right on my leg.
I also have four distinct burn marks from cooking. In my defense, only one could have been avoided by wearing oven mitts. The rest were just unsupervised parts of my body being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Take it from someone who's been there: don't cook in a crop top.
On the bright side, I think I'm just a few burns away from being able to tell the difference between 350 and 400 degrees by a quick touch of the hand. It's a rather specific superpower with a niche market, but not all heroes wear capes.
Still, I don't have any epic stories of falling from trees or being thrown off a ski slope or skateboard. I'm just a brain that is piloting a meat suit and it doing a fairly poor job at it.
It's a bit like Operation, but I keep touching the sides. Of the oven. With my hands.
But it's often the scars that people can't see that are the ones that are worth talking about the most.
For instance, if you could see inside of my mouth, I would look like an inside-out Joker from "Batman". Many people know me to be a compulsive nail-biter, but you aren't able to see the additional stress I release by biting the inside of my cheeks until they bleed in several places. I can feel the rough, calloused result of nearly a decade of concern on the inside of my mouth.
But if you were to see me at any given moment, you may not be able to see the concerns that weigh on my shoulders.
I also have stretch marks on both of my legs. You wouldn't think someone that's as thin as I am would have stretch marks, but they're actually from a time when I used to be much bigger and much shorter than this. They're what's left of the self-conscious, shy girl that I used to be before puberty hit, and my problems were supposedly solved by a growth spurt and a high metabolism.
But if you were to see me at any given moment, you may not see that I often lack self-confidence.
I don't look like someone you would think to be worried about, and that's the point. I don't have visible scars from self-harming or dress/act in a way that would send up red flags. In fact, I am the person that has been employed to look for those signs of help in other people.
Despite our appearance, we have all been there. Some of us are still there.
There's nothing worse than putting up such an effective façade that when you do go to someone for help, you're pushed away because the person doesn't recognize you as "damaged" enough to be serious. If you're always the happy and supportive one, people are going to assume that you will find your way back to that place without help, like it's a default setting.
It's not.
The point of this isn't to say, "Don't judge a book by its cover." That would be too simple. The point isn't even to be there for people who need help, whether they look like they need it or not because no one should have to be told to be there for people who are asking for help. They are literally telling you to help them.
The point is to be more honest with yourself and others about your scars. Don't hide them, even if they are hidden. Don't be afraid of where you came from or where you are going.
We should be just as proud of our hidden scars as we are of our visible ones. Sometimes, the ones that people can't see came from the biggest battles we fought.
I wrote this article as a way to show my hidden scars to anyone who is reading.
