I have three kinds of scars on my legs. The first kind is my stretch marks, which I’ve earned from rapidly losing weight from my chubby, middle school years (long story). The second kind is the kind you get from just being a kid. I have a nickel sized patch of smooth, nerve-less, pale skin on my left knee from falling on it three times in three consecutive weeks. I have a centimeter long scar on the right side of my right knee from the nail of an overexcited dog.
The third kind is the kind that comes from complicated thoughts and emotions. That kind is shown as myriad horizontal and vertical light and dark lines on my upper thighs and lower hip. Those are called self-harm scars.
Back when I was younger and when those self-harm scars were fresher or, worse, have yet to become scars, you would never see me in shorts.I covered them, perhaps more out of common courtesy than any kind of self-consciousness. I didn’t want to make people worry.
For all intents and purposes, I was fine.
I had a roof over my head, I had pretty decent grades and I had some friends. Logically, there wasn’t anything wrong with my life that should have made me want to harm myself, and I didn’t want kind, selfless people to waste any sort of sympathy for me when there were other people out there — the homeless, the hungry, the struggling — who needed it more than I did.
Long story short, I was too caught up in my own head that I didn’t want to hear anything from anyone, so I covered them. If I were any lesser kind of human being, I probably wouldn’t have covered them. I would have flaunted them, almost slapping people in the face with them.
“Hell yes, your eyes are right!” I would have been saying. “I’m about as fucked up on the outside as I am on the inside!” Thank God I never became that kind of person.
To this day, I still can’t put into words the reason why I self-harmed. I wasn’t trying to get anyone’s attention, which was why I used my legs instead of my arms. I definitely wasn’t trying to injure myself to the point of death.
Almost pitifully enough, my anxiety worried that death would get in the way of homework. I think that maybe I wanted to make physical what I felt mentally, reflecting my internal pain on my skin instead of letting it out through words. But, regardless of the reason, my depression left its mark and years after it made its last physical mark on my skin, I can wear shorts again.
It’s strange, but I think I can wear shorts again because I’m not ashamed of those scars.
I’m not proud of them, don’t get me wrong, but I feel no shame in them and I feel no fear in showing them. I’m not afraid of pity or sympathy (that’s other people’s business). I’m not afraid of being judged (again, that’s other people’s business). Every day, I see those scars and they remind me what happens when I bottle things up and force myself to be who I’m not.
Those scars show that I’ve been through worse things and that though they’ve left their mark, the worst things can heal.
Why would I ever want to cover that up?
