scars.

 
"We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived."

- Chris Cleave, Little Bee

When I was a little girl, I wanted desperately to be a tomboy. It didn't help that I loved playing with my dolls and reading my books and going to school, all the things I thought tomboys must hate. But having a brother aided my cause, and I often came inside with bumps and bruises and scratches up and down my scrawny legs. I remember crawling into my grandfather's lap, proudly displaying what I affectionately called my "bruise collection," naming where I'd earned each scab and each sore patch of skin.

As you get older, you realize that bruises and scratches and scars aren't something to be proud of. The world isn't like my grandfather, interested in what's wrong with my finger or why the skin on my arm looks funny. Instead, the world offers bandages and healing cream and make-up and plastic surgery and laser removal to help your bumps and wrinkles and imperfections disappear.

Only they don't really, do they? They're still there, just covered up a little better than they would be otherwise. They're covered, but you know, deep down, they're there, there with memory of what happened and when.

Skin cancer runs in my family, and I'm naturally fair-skinned (read: pasty). I've got freckles and moles dotting my body, and I've always been rather proud of them, until one day I realized they could kill me. So now I go to the doctor a couple of times a year, just to get everything checked out. A few weeks ago, for the first time ever, I didn't get a clean report.

Now there are three to four inch scars where two of my moles once were.

They offered me plastic surgery, which I thought was a little extreme. Then I looked down and realized: These are not pretty scars. They'll heal with time, I suppose, with Neosporin and laser treatment. But I'll always have these angry-looking marks up and down my thigh and arm. When I wear sleeveless shirts or pull on a pair of shorts, people will see, and they will wonder what happened.

At first, I felt ashamed. As I glanced at the evidence that remained, I didn't like what I saw. Big, ugly wounds marring my skin.

Then I remember the eight-year-old me, the pride I took in the scratches I received from climbing trees and playing outside with my brother.

I thought back to Little Bee, to the moment she tells us that scars are beauty. Scars are survival.

I have scars, yes, but you know what? I don't have cancer.

Instead, I survived, and because of that, I won't cover these scars of mine with bandages or shirtsleeves. They mean I'm getting older, tougher, and I've been around long enough to have lived a little, to have accumulated some battle wounds from life.

My scars are beauty and story and me, and for that, I am grateful.

What do your scars mean?

{photo by Miss Mirro via Bippity Boppity Boo}