“Scars” – A guest post

The following is a guest post from Ellie Eaton, a member of our community. Ellie offered to share this wonderful piece of creative writing with us. You can also find this piece on the Survivor Creativity page.

Scars
by Ellie Eaton

I fell this week in my classroom. I landed hard, and got a large abrasion on the top of my kneecap. It hurts a lot! Now every time I bend my knee (which happens all the time during the day) it cracks and pulls and hurts some more. I have to keep it covered to protect it. However, I can see it starting to heal around the edges. I know in a week or so there will be new pink skin grown to make it whole again.

I wish the same healing would happen for my heart . . . my soul. I wish for, no, I long for the day when I carry a scar. It’s still an open tender wound caused by the betrayal of a man I trusted. That was his job, to be trusted. He took that trust and used it as a weapon to hurt me. The wound he inflicted is still fresh, even though I haven’t seen him in two years. I haven’t found the way yet to heal my heart.

The other thing is, people see my knee and exclaim, “What happened?! Are you okay?” They immediately ask what’s being done to fix the trip hazard to make sure it doesn’t happen again. No one, including me, spent even a second blaming me for getting hurt when I tripped. It’s so much easier to have empathy for a person with a wound you can see and you can understand.

This invisible wound is trickier. Most days I function quite well. It’s easy for most of the people who know to forget about it. It must be getting better by now. Maybe it’s too scary to think about. Maybe if an injury happened to me, it could happen to them. But mostly, I think it’s the invisible nature of it that enables others to forget. It’s only in my everyday consciousness. I don’t have to see it. I feel it every day.

I want my scar. You know the kind. You don’t notice it every day. When you do notice it, you think, “Oh yeah, I remember that one. Man, that hurt.” Then you get back to your day, because the scar doesn’t hurt. It’s simply evidence of a wound that has healed.

©  2012 by Ellie Eaton