Remember when you were younger and the prompt up on the whiteboard was: what would be your superpower, and why?

When I was younger, I always had different answers for that question. I would want to fly, to be invisible, to have as much money as Bruce Wayne etc., etc... Lately, though, I have been thinking about what superpower I would have, and I think it would be the ability to embrace my scars.

My skin was not without its fair share of flaws, and to make matters worse, around the age of 13 I realized that I was prone to keloids.

For those who don’t know what a keloid is, it is basically a scar created by excessive tissue growth. It looks like a raised bump on the skin and is tough and discolored.

The problem with keloids is that if you are prone to them, every little mark on your body suddenly becomes a game of Russian roulette. Will the mosquito bite turn into a keloid? Will my ear piercing end up being a keloid? What about the acne on my shoulders? All at once, your body turns into this battlefield where you stand behind a barricade praying that the excess tissue will not break down the walls.

Unfortunately, most of the time I ended up being highly unlucky. So naturally, I was devastated, and thus began my journey of throwing away all sleeveless shirts, and growing out my hair enough to cover my earlobes. To be quite frank, I felt so much like an outsider in hot Houston as I could possibly feel. A girl displaced in a setting that didn’t quite cater to her biological discrepancies.

I didn’t give up just yet though.

In tenth grade, I decided that perhaps I would be able to change my hormonal imbalances enough to stop the formation of these horrid skin tags that just would not stop marking my skin. I worked out excessively, turned to a vegetarian diet, and embraced a far healthier lifestyle than I had ever done. It did wonders for my appearance, but the keloids just would not stop, and that is where I gave up.

My junior year of high school, I decided that, yes, Ketaki, it was now time for you to buy more cardigans and just give up any hope of putting your hair in an updo.

It is a terrible feeling to not be able to control this hideous part of your body that you have no control over, but because it was a cosmetic issue and I did not want to inject multiple steroid shots into my already imbalanced body, I simply turned to covering up my skin.

That in itself is a strange feeling, to constantly hide a part of you, to feel like an outlaw in your own skin, but it worked for a while.

Then came the most daunting thing I had done in a while. Prom. When it was time for prom dress shopping I fell in love with an off the shoulder gown, and I just could not help but buy it, but due to my fear I also ended up buying some full coverage concealer to put on my shoulders. It was a step closer to confidence, but certainly not in the way I intended to go.

Sometimes, however, confidence strikes you in the smallest of forms, in the smallest of beings.

Fast forward to the summer before college began, a summer that was blazing, but also a summer I worked as a toddler class teacher. The thing about sleepy toddlers that refuse to sleep is that they spew out whatever comes into their tiny little mouths, and one of these little ones ended up giving me a boost of confidence I did not know I could get.

In the midst of slowly tapping one of my children to sleep she reached up to my arms and began to trace a path from one scar to the next, and although I was busy attempting to get her to sleep what she said to me is something I hold with me dearly.

She said, “Ms. K, you have stars on your arms,” and it took me a great deal of effort to not bust out into tears when she said it.

What I saw as a humiliating deformity, this little child saw as a constellation.

So I attempted, one step at a time to become comfortable in my skin. To appreciate who I was, and I finally began hanging up the cardigans I was so used to wrapping myself up in. It is in the little things, the tiny boosts of confidence.

Here I was, finally able to explain the dots on my skin to people without feeling my soul crumpling up inside of me. Finally able to put my hair back into a ponytail without feeling like a strange person, but my confidence still was not at its height.

My confidence is still not at the top where I would like it to be. I still feel strange sometimes when I look at the various marks on my skin that should not be there, and it is still an unpredictable matter as to whether or not I will end up with more keloids.

I had surgery to remove the keloid on my ear, and really, getting that thing off of my ear gave me so much positive energy it was ridiculous, but I am aware that the rest of my keloids cannot be surgically removed.

So rather than learning to live with it, I turn it into empowerment.

It is tough to have skin that is not flawless especially when it seems everyone around you is just glowing with perfection, but once you embrace your skin, and really become comfortable in it confidence is just a few steps away.

I will never have fully healed skin, nor will it be free of marks, but until I gain enough confidence to saunter out in a bright, floral, sleeveless blouse I will attempt to look at my skin and see the stars instead of scars. A bright shining light of hope to lead me to my endpoint.

Along the way, though, I can definitely use my awareness as a superpower to defeat the negative energy and stigma surrounding imperfection.