Day Thirty Two: Scars

I love all my scars.

I had a pretty rough and tumble childhood. Many of my scars are from being stupid. Some of them are being brave. Courage and stupidity are often the same thing, we just get praised for one and slapped for the other.

When I worked at a summer camp, I once ran down a steep hill after an eight year old girl I thought was in trouble (she was fine) and had a four inch piece of wood embedded in my leg. The scar is light and thin, and you can’t see it unless I point it out, but you can still kind of feel where it went in.

I have dozens of scars from fencing because our club was improperly equipped. Broken swords and poorly aimed thrusts left me bleeding more often than not. When I was a dancer I was notoriously clumsy (for a dancer) and frequently left the studio with bruises, bumps and bloody feet and legs. I have a scar on my thigh from a very bad accident on the monkey bars as a child, a scar on my ankle from jumping a fence without seeing the barbed wire, and a scar over my eyebrow from the chickenpox.

My worst scar is the one on my right knee. Those of you who know me hear of me speak of it with pride quite often. Everyone who knows me knows the story: I was stupidly inline skating at about ten o’clock at night on a busy road when I hit a rock and skidded about thirty feet on one knee. I lost a chunk of my kneecap, tore a tendon and striated the band in my leg so badly that I’ve been recovering for the last five years.

The reason I love this scar in particular, and the reason I believe that we should love all our scars, is because this scar is a symbol of how well I can heal. When I hurt my knee, it pretty much destroyed any hope I ever had of fencing for college or the Olympics. It also put a serious damper in my ballet, preventing me from entering a competition for that year. But because I couldn’t dance or fence and could barely walk, I was forced to find other things to occupy my time. Before my senior year (the year of the accident) I hadn’t given much consideration to writing as a career or life choice. But I started journaling during PE and started writing during fencing practice and stories I previous gave only passing thought to became fully developed in my mind.

This year I graduated with full honors from my graduate program. The Dean of my school actually told me that he doesn’t normally read the final paper the graduate students are required to do, but my reviewer raved about mine, so it was the first one he had read in almost ten years. I’m not going to say that my injury put me on the right path, this isn’t a freaking Lifetime movie. But if I had spent that time dancing and fencing, I would be in a very different place today.

I certainly wouldn’t be writing some lame blog.

Challenge to my Readers:

A lot of girls I know cover their scars with makeup. Try skipping the cover for a day and celebrating your adventures. If the story is lame, create a better one. Share your stories and laugh about your mistakes, your victories and your dog bites.

This is your body, love even the imperfections.