If you've been reading these stories since the beginning, then I feel like we're friends. Not really. But close enough. And today, I want to talk about something personal: the stories behind my scars. This post was inspired by this video that Lady M shared with me:
I just love her foul-mouthed positivity! (Seriously, how could that not be up my alley?) Anyway, we'll get right to it. Content Warning for child abuse, self-harm, NSFW stories, and (SFW) photos of scars.
In my on-again-off-again dating profile, I write that I have "seven facial piercings, six scars with stories, five nieces/nephews, four younger siblings, three great pets, two sweet tattoos, and a partridge in a pear tree! (Full disclosure: I own neither a partridge, nor a pear tree.)." This is a little collage I made of my various scars (except for one obvious one, as you shall see).
I'll go over them in roughly chronological order.
1. My Chin
When I was like three or four, I slipped on a bathroom stool and bashed my chin on the vanity. I had to go to the hospital to get stitches. I can't remember if it was Christmas or my birthday, but I got to unwrap a bunch of presents for some reason or other. Christmas and my birthday are really close together, so the gifts are always wrapped similarly - I was actually going to be named "Noel" if I was born on Christmas, which was when I was due. But I was late, beginning a pattern that would continue to the present day. Anyway, I remember getting the gifts in the hospital, and one was the spaceship that the Silverhawks flew around in. I was big into Silverhawks and Thundercats, in addition to She-Ra and Batgirl, but guess which of those pairs of shows my parents chose to reinforce? I'll give you a hint: here's one of our Halloween costumes.
I'm the little girl who everyone thinks is Lion-O.
Photo credit to my daddy and a timer;
photo-of-photo credit to my brother JD (Snarf).
Anyway, I got the spaceship, which really made my day, and even made me forget that I was in the hospital getting stitches. Here's what the scar looks like today:
Pardon the stubble, but it makes the scar more visible.
2. The Cat
When I was in second grade and my brother JD was in pre-K, during our mother's custody, he and I still had a good relationship before she poisoned it (we have since recovered). This was possibly the first step in that poisoning.
One day, JD built himself a pillow fort from sofa cushions. He wanted his cat inside with him, and asked me to go get her. I obliged, but the only way to get her in was through a hole in the roof of the pillow fort. I told JD I had to lower her in, and he would have to grab her. Due to said lowering, my view of him was blocked, so I couldn't see what he was doing because of my arms and the cat herself. He told me to let her go; I asked, "Do you have her;" JD said Yes.
I let go of the cat, and she fell. He apparently did not have her, and the claws came out. She drew blood. JD ran crying to our mother. I just kinda stood there in shock, because I didn't want to hurt my brother - I just wanted to get the cat into his fort with him.
Then my mother called me into the kitchen, where she was holding JD's hand in one of her own, and the cat in the other. She interrogated me about the incident, I answered honestly, and she insisted first that I did it on purpose, and later that I should have been more responsible. When I protested that I couldn't see inside the fort and double-checked with JD that he had her, she got frustrated and screamed, "Well, see how you like it!"
Then she threw the cat at me.
Highlighting for visibility, but as always, you can click for huge.
The scar is hard to see, if you don't know what you're looking for. But I'll carry it with me for the rest of my life.
3. Spring Break
To tell this mini-story, I first need to tell two micro-stories:
- When I was in third grade, my mother beat me daily for that whole year. My father found out when JD said to him at the start of a visit, "Whatever you do, don't look at D's butt!" He of course did, embarrassing me, and took me to the E.R. the following morning for dozens of egg-shaped bruises of varying coloration, ranging from just above my belt line down to my mid-thighs. He got custody after an absurdly protracted legal battle, and all kinds of weirdly conflicting testimony. I've read the transcripts. Everyone - and I mean everyone: my mother, her second husband, the expert witnesses, my-own-fucking-self - said one thing, and then said another totally different thing. Ugh.
- For years afterward, I was forced to go on court-mandated visits with my abuser, with no acknowledgment of wrongdoing from her, no finding of wrongdoing from the justice system, and no ability to stop the constant gaslighting in which she would follow The Narcissist's Prayer almost to the letter, insisting that she was the victim because her babies had been taken away from her. On one such visit when I was in the fifth grade, we got into a fight over a comic book in my backpack: she dragged me, my backpack between us in a stupid tug-of-war, into the restroom of a fast food restaurant and started kicking the door shut on my arms. I let her build up a good rhythm and then broke it, then knocked her to the floor and dragged her by the hair into the dining area, and gave her a public beating. It took three cops to pull me off of her, but the end result was that I, at 11 years old, won the legal right to say No to visits. Which, while not absolutely unprecedented, was highly unexpected.
My parents asked why I hadn't been going on visits after a few weeks of not doing so, and I just showed them the copy of the letter I had printed out for myself. They were proud of me, to the point that over that Spring Break, they didn't even hassle me about being on top of my homework like they usually did. This turned out to be an OK move on their part, because that semester I got straight As for the first time in my life. I was still skipping out on most of my homework, but I guess I was feeling so good that some of the homework assignments I would have otherwise blown off seemed interesting enough for me to actually do them.
Anyway, one day I was hanging out at Local Park with my friends, just chilling and shooting the shit, when we all decided to walk across the top of the monkey bars. As I did so, I slipped and fell through - right through. I didn't clip a joint on the way down, thankfully, but I did scrape the inside of my arm just above the elbow on the same arm as the Cat Scar.
This one, at least, is plainly visible with no highlighting.
I like to think of these scars as Chapter Markers in my life: the one on my hand signifies the beginning of the breakdown of my relationship with my mother, and the one above the elbow signifies the start of my breaking free of her.
See, after that six months of radio silence, I decided that enough was enough and wrote her another letter saying that I wouldn't let it turn into a waiting game, and we were through. I would never go on a visit with her again. What love I once had for her, she had strangled. She immediately called for a counseling session with the only therapist who had never met or spoken with my father, in accordance with a court order. My mom (technically "step-mom," but I call her my mom because she's the one who responsibly raised me and undid a lot of my mother's damage) drove me and said she'd wait in the parking lot in case things went South.
Things went South.
Inside, my mother immediately said she'd had a pair of dreams one night that she wanted to relate to us. First, she dreamt she was in a courtroom, and she drew a line down the middle of the coffee table with her finger, saying that she was on one side of a courtroom and my father and I were on the other. There was testimony and proceedings and such, and she woke up, and she asked God for an angel to help her interpret the dream. Then she fell back asleep and had another dream, about the same courtroom, in which God and Jesus were on one side and Satan was on the other.
I stopped her right there and pointed out that she had put herself on the same side of the Coffee Table Courtroom as God and Jesus, and Satan on the same side as my father and me. I said I was done with her Supermarket Psychology, and done with her, and I walked out. I told my mom what happened, and she took me out for ice cream to celebrate.
Because we're metal as fuck like that.
\m/ (>.<) \m/
4. My Shins
I count these as one, even though they're two (they come in a set). During my senior year, my European History AP class took a field trip on an odd Tuesday. We went into the Nearby Major City, where we were going to get an early breakfast, watch the opening trade at the Prominent Finance Industry Building, and then spend the rest of the day Seeing the City Sights.
Breakfast went as planned, and we started walking through the city streets to the Prominent Finance Industry Building, when a too-much-like-TV moment happened: we saw a crazy event happening on a pile of televisions in a storefront. It was Breaking News, and there was a lot of smoke, and we crowded around the storefront to try to make out what was happening from the shoddy captions on the silent television sets.
The whole date was Tuesday, September 11th, 2001. We found out that two airplanes had been flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City - and here we were, just two or three city blocks from a Prominent Finance Industry Building, within spitting distance of a Major International Airport.
We decided to call off the trip, and spent the rest of the day at a student's house, watching the news as we processed the event and discussed what this could mean for the future of our nation and the world.
That spring, we returned to the Nearby Major City after the AP exam was finished for a do-over, and just had a nice day tooling around. We rented some quad bicycles - meant to be driven by four people in a rough square - and set off along a path. However, with the teacher included, we had thirteen people, which meant that someone had to ride bitch, but wouldn't have to pedal. Ever the lazy cuss, I volunteered. Our three-quad caravan ran into a weird obstacle at one point, and had to back up, which meant putting our feet on the ground Flintstones-style and pushing backward. Except our quad had an extra pair of legs in the back, which got caught by one of the pedals. I screamed, and we all stopped, then moved forward. My pants were undamaged (somehow?), but I rolled up the leg to take a look, and could see pale exposed bone within a long, narrow outline of blood. We busted out the first aid kit and had at it, and whaddaya know, but I still have those pants to this day. Not that that matters or anything. I'm just proud of the fact that I can still fit into pants from high school.
These two are hard to see, if you don't know what you're looking for. Hence the highlighting.
Anyway, a couple years later, I had finished my freshman year of college and moved back in with my parents after voluntarily withdrawing. I still drove two hours each way every weekend to visit my friends and then-girlfriend, Fae Jennie. One weekend I was driving down, and I really had to pee, so I pulled over after going under an overpass and got out of my car. I walked off the side of the road onto some loose chunks of discarded concrete, and tripped in the dark. I bashed my other shin on the edge of a chunk, and got this scar here:
I told her a forklift had run into me, just to screw with her. She was, shall we say, less than amused.
5. The Equals Sign
This is another pair that I group as one. When I was a sophomore in high school, Fight Club came out and I went to see it with my friends. There's a part in there where "Tyler" burns the narrator's arm with lye, saying at the start that it's a chemical burn and it will be the worst pain he has ever experienced.
I knew what lye was from my accelerated chemistry class: plain old sodium hydroxide. So I stole some from the lab and brought it home. When I had screwed up my courage one night, I went into the unfinished back room of our basement, and gave myself a chemical burn. I had to keep quiet, because my brother A was in the finished part of the basement playing video games. I just walked in with a jug of vinegar in my hand and the vial of NaOH flakes in my pocket.
I licked a thin line on the inside of my left forearm, then dumped out some of the lye on a paper towel and placed flakes on the line, one by one. When I had the whole line built up, I oh-so-carefully let some spit down on top to further fuel the reaction. I watched as the saliva bubbled silently, holding my arm straight and still, breathing deeply to keep quiet through the burning pain that just kept increasing. I watched the reaction get clearer and clearer as the bubbles in my saliva gave way to the reacting chemicals - I saw my epidermis dissolve away, then the spotty yellow-white subcutaneous fat layer I knew about from freshman biology. When I saw the red-and-white streaks of my muscle tissue, I knew that I had given myself a third-degree burn, and decided to stop. I uncapped the jug of vinegar and poured it on the burn over the slop sink, wrapped a paper towel around my arm and rolled down the sleeve of my shirt, then calmly walked upstairs to the bathroom.
I had already laid out some materials on the vanity, and I put them to use: I opened a package of sterile gauze and folded it into about the shape of the gaping burn wound, then placed it on top and wrapped an Ace bandage around the whole thing. Then I opened a bottle of rubbing alcohol and soaked the dressing through. I figured that I must have been in shock, since I felt the cold of the alcohol on my skin below the dressing, but not the burn of it in the bleeding wound. Then I went to bed.
I wore only long-sleeved shirts months. Fight Club came out in October, and I remember during Thanksgiving at my grandparents' place, I noticed some yellow-green pus around the edges of the massive scab when I did my daily examination. So I slowly, carefully, and painfully removed the scab, cleared away all the pus with a Q-tip while flushing the profusely bleeding wound, then doused the whole thing in alcohol. This time, I felt the burn - but again, I kept quiet, as the house was full of family. I did up a fresh dressing and rejoined the family for after-dinner games.
Some time later, my father noticed the Ace bandage peeking out from beneath a shirt sleeve, and asked what had happened. I'm not sure how the conversation went, but the whole truth came out over dinner, so he took Decisive Action: he took away my knives.
So a few years later, I think in the fall of 2005, when I returned to college after a hiatus To Find Myself, I gave myself another one. Because it made an equals sign. That's right: I was doing the equals sign before it was cool. Funny thing, though: about halfway through, when I was still not feeling very much pain at all, I said to myself, "This is stupid. Why am I doing this?" And I stopped. I wouldn't do any more self-harm for over ten years. This is what they look like today:
The first one is on the bottom, and the second one is on top.
6. Ten Years Later
So I spent most of my twenties in therapy, working out my issues and jumping from job to job, until I found my calling: I wanted to be a librarian. I got into the top library school in the nation on pluck and a song (and a really strong personal essay, I guess), as I had no real library experience to speak of. While volunteering in a school to fulfill a requirement for a studio class, I found that schools had changed for the better since I was a kid. I decided that I wanted to be part of that ongoing change, since most of the problems I'd had with school had either been fixed or were in the process of being fixed.
Around this time, I met a lady on the Faceborg. She sent me a friend request out of the blue one day, and my first thought was, "That's a bot." But she had been a member for a while, and had a bunch of photos going years back - many of which were of a very good-looking woman with a little girl in a bunch of scenic locations around the country. So I messaged her, asking something like, "Do I know you?" Turns out, she'd seen a comment of mine in some group we were both in, then checked out my profile and liked the cut of my jib. I approved the request.
I looked her profile over a bit more in-depth, and had a question about her listed occupation, so I asked her, "What's a 'topless ballerina'?" She clarified that she was a stripper. Turns out, that little girl is her sister's kid, and her sister is kind of a screw-up, so she sometimes takes care of her and also takes her on vacations and things. We talked a lot, about all kinds of things. I never hit on her or asked her out, because she's a stripper and has probably heard every line in the book. Really, I was just flattered that she wanted to be friends with me, based on something witty I'd said and a few minutes of Faceborg stalking.
Fast forward six months to a year, and I'm up at my mom's place doing tech support one summer. In the middle of untangling some Gordian knot of spyware, malware, and bloatware, I get a ping from the Faceborg: the topless ballerina said, "Something tells me you'd be a really good boyfriend." (I was still presenting male online, this blog notwithstanding). I was frustrated from arguing with technology, and replied something to the effect of, "I know about a dozen women who would disagree."
Then I got back to work, realized what I'd just said, thought better of it, and followed up with, "Wait, can I start over? I meant to say, 'I'm flattered you think so. Wanna give it a shot?' Sorry about that, it's been a tough day." We met up for the first time over that Thanksgiving break to spend a weekend at her place. Except I drank some tainted water on the train ride down and was sick by the time she picked me up. We're talking forceful ejections from both ends. It was awful.
She asked me if anything would help. I asked if she had green tea - nope. Orange juice - nope. Gatorade - nope. Chicken and wild rice soup - nope. She said she'd drive to the local 24-hour grocery store and pick something up, then came back with green tea, orange juice, Gatorade, and canned chicken and wild rice soup. I cleared up in about nine hours, but by that time, she was coming down with something of her own. So I nursed her back to health - but by the time she recovered, it was time for me to get to the bus back home. I spent the whole ride back thinking, "Welp, that's the end of that!" We had cuddled a bit and watched a movie or two, but we were mostly sick and taking care of each other. Which is sweet in its own way, but hardly a good first impression.
Except when I got back home, there was a Faceborg message waiting for me: "So... this might sound weird, but I had a really good time this weekend. We should meet up again. But without the sick part." (Or something like that.) I was blown away.
We met up a couple more times over the next six months or so. I went out to have a Last Party Weekend before I had to buckle down for finals. I thought things went pretty well, we made plans to meet back up after finals, and I headed back home on a cloud. A day or two later, I got another Faceborg message from her: "So... sorry to do this by text... but this isn't working for me. I don't want you to come out again, just for me to send you right back. Sorry."
To recap, my long-distance stripper girlfriend of about six months just broke up with me by text right at the start of finals. "Distraught" is a word, but I think my two reactions really speak to my character.
My first reaction was to write something like, "OK, thank you for being straightforward about it. And I'm not gonna try to change your mind. But I'm really confused - it seemed like things were going well?" She said I just didn't turn her on. I said I was willing to hear that, but I thought she liked that I "wasn't like other guys" (her words). The conversation wound on and on, me repeatedly reassuring her that I wasn't trying to argue but was honestly confused, because things just weren't adding up. We were going pretty slow, but it was going pretty good, to all indications except this sudden last.
Finally, she said, "Look, my sister's back in rehab, and I have to take care of her kid again. I just didn't want to get into it. But I can't have a relationship now." I sat in shell-shock for a bit, then reasoned that if she had just said that, I would've been absolutely fine with a break. But for her to blame me to avoid an awkward conversation - that was pretty final. I thanked her for opening up at last, she apologized for lying at first, and we kinda left it at that (though we stayed friends and still talk - in fact, just a few weeks ago, she offered to help me with makeup stuff!).
My second reaction, though, was to spiral down into despair about how it doesn't matter how good of a guy I am, things are always going to get ruined, and this was just fucking typical, wasn't it, and I'm just fucking poison because all my relationships are doomed for one reason or another - and then I drank a bottle of whiskey, wrapped an Ace bandage around my scrotum, and used a can of compressed air turned upside down to try and freeze my balls off. About the time I didn't feel the cold any more, I realized that I was relapsing into self-harm for the first time in over a decade. I remembered that the last time I did this, I'd thought it was stupid and gave up. I unwrapped my sac and went to bed. Turns out, I gave myself a pretty good case of scrotal frostbite, but it cleared up on its own with some triple antibiotic ointment and regular dressing changes, with fairly minimal scarring.
I'm not posting a picture of this one.
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