Image illustrated by Staff Artist, Damaris Contreras.
CW: medical trauma, graphic descriptions of injury
The crack of the plaster fills the tiny doctor’s room, snapping open and ripping apart the cast I have spent the past six weeks picking at. One side, then the other, and my arm breathes for the first time in what feels like forever.
“Oh, wow,” my arm surgeon says. “This is healing beautifully.”
I can’t—won’t—look. My dad takes a picture in case I change my mind and want to see the scar they’ve both started discussing, even as I sit there, adamantly avoiding looking.
At seventeen, I had a chunk of bone in my left ulnar removed. It had somehow become too long, cutting off blood flow to torn ligaments and fingers. To fix that—to give me back a working hand—I was given a gnarled, white, bumpy scar running down the length of my left forearm.
My doctor and my dad both told me it looked great; after the trauma I had been through, they expected it to look so much worse than this.
To me—it was already so much worse than this.
This was a scar that ran from the edge of my wrist until a half-finger’s length shy of my elbow. It was red and puckered and white and angry and ugly. My arm was ugly.
I was able to hide this ugly and the other scars maring that same arm for a few weeks while it healed in a soft splint. But every time that splint came out, eyes would widen and mouths would gape and soft utterances of, “oh, wow,” would remind me that this scar was ugly.
But society wanted me to think it was beautiful. No, more than that, it wanted me to profess that it was beautiful. To say that it was beautiful in my own voice, creating a space where they could have opinions (“she’s just so strong, to love herself like that,” and, “that’s what healing is all about. Looking for the happy in the bad.”) To love my scars and my “battle wounds” and “visible strength” and tell strangers with a humble smile that I’d been through worse. That they could get through worse. People wanted my scars to create a story; they didn’t want to have to experience their own.
My scars are other people’s inspiration porn, but my trauma.
To have a stranger on the beach come up to me and ask, unabashedly, where my scars came from. To have a little girl look at me with wide, fearful eyes and ask her mother why my arms looked that way. To have old folks, unprompted, tell me that they’d seen battle wounds just like mine, and I could get through anything, but what was a young girl like me doing with them?
This is what my society creates of my scars.
Society values scars on other people as visible, definable symbols of strength. They take stretch marks and make them into tiger stripes. They take scars and turn them into battle wounds. They create a narrative out of someone else’s body to ease the fear of their own. Visible signs of disability—in this case scars—are not subject to public objectification simply because they are visible. And even then, even when they are creating these signs of struggle for them, it must be physical. No emotional pain is allowed to be seen as strength; healed self-harm is not overcoming strength, but a reminder of weakness. There are values on trauma, based on how a wound was created.
Scars are not your inspiration porn. You do not have the right to look at someone else’s body trauma and claim victory over a battle they fought. You do not have the right to see the visible remains of a disability experience and use it as your own incentive that life isn’t “so hard” for you, because at least you don’t have scars all over your forearms. You do not have the right to tell someone they should value their scars simply because you do.
I’ve had doctors, nurses, strangers, acquaintances, relatives, friends, teachers—people, generally—tell me that I should be proud of my scars. That I was somehow dishonoring them because I hated the way they looked.
My ugly reminder is not your beautiful reassurance.
These scars—from seven arm surgeries, an emergency appendectomy that nearly killed me, and all the invisible ones my disability has left—are trauma. There is no other way to say it.
I do not view them as beautiful. I do not see them as visible reminders of strength, as something to inspire me every day, as a clear picture that I “survived my darkest days.”
My scars are ugly, and hurt to touch, and will mark my skin forever.
My scars are not there to serve as your inspiration porn. The only reminder they create is of surgery, of hospitals, of anesthesia and pain medicine and fog and pain and hate and fear.
If you choose to view your scars as inspiration that you are past your darkest day, by all means. If scars—on your body—are a reason to keep moving, then let it be a reason for you. I simply ask that you stop taking my scars as your inspiration.
I write this having just come out of my eleventh major surgery, my seventh on my hands and arms. The day my “unveiling” happened, I cried in the shower when it fully dawned on me: I may never be able to use my right hand properly again. My finger has an anchor, sutured through my bone, because of my body’s tendency towards major tears. I can’t bend it at the top joint, and there’s a definite possibility I might never again. Writing, drawing, painting–the three biggest aspects of creativity in life for me–have been stolen because of this surgery, replaced by a thin red line down my finger. They will never be how they once were.
Reconciling this image of what I was supposed to look like versus what I did look like; that cognitive dissonance made me nauseous every time it crossed my mind. In order to understand this image I was being presented with, I forced myself to look at pictures of my scars. To examine those photos until I could stomach looking at them with my own eyes, without the protection of a screen I was able to turn off. This process repeats until I am able to recognize, fully and absolutely, this is now what my body looks like. It is mine, and these scars have to be there.
That scar will not be a reminder of what I have overcome.
This is my narrative, and it is a reminder of what I have lost.
