My Scars Are My Legacy

The things we're told by society include the shame of scars. The shame of your wounds, physical or mental, being out where other people might see them and be upset.
We're all really, really good at hiding those scars, so we don't scare others.
But all that does is build it up until we break apart, and since we have no guide, no understanding of what to do after we've shattered, we just end up scooping up those shattered glass pieces and shoving them back into ourselves, hoping no one notices while we bleed out.

But what if that shattering, what if that thing that cracked us opened, was a thing that grew us and made us better? What if we knew to plan for it?
What if we never built the uncrackable wall?



I sat in a room full of writers--the ones who promise to open you and get you and lift you. I waited for the prompt that I knew was coming. The one that would allow me to spill my soul onto a piece of paper.

“What has cracked you open? What is it making space for?”

I used to be uncrackable. I used to be hard and untouchable.


Sometimes I miss that. But I know I wasn’t living. Not really.

I was breathing. And laughing on cue.

But I never fully understood why another person cried over their pain. Their broken spirit.

Spirits were only breakable if you made them china dolls. Little porcelain mementos on a shelf beneath your ribcage.

I’m not sure at what point I decided that wasn’t living--the just breathing.

Perhaps it was when he first proposed.
Perhaps it was the day he left for war.
Or the moment I held my children.

I only knew that one day, one when I least expected it, my defenses were down. I was hurt. And cracked. And ripped open.

And not from him. Or from war. Or from anywhere I remotely expected it.

I hated myself for it. My open-ness. My exposed-ness.

I was betrayed. When I had worked so hard to never experience that again. I was too strong. Too smart. Too prepared. Too stoic to allow anything to crack me again.

Or so I thought. Until I was splayed open. On the ground. Feeling all the pain of loss.

I wanted to rage.

It must have been a mistake! Or all those moments these tiny shards of glass in my meticulous armor had weakened me.

Until….I turned to the floor. To the ground. To the earth. To gain my bearings again. To see from a different view.

Begging for my throat to open. Pleading with my chest to lighten.

And then, grateful for it.

I was feeling pain. Because somehow in the past 10 years, I started living. I began to believe in people and to let them in. Began to understand that life actually IS made of broken china doll moments and cracked pieces of shards on the floor.

Life is made of experiencing and pain and betrayal and anger--all of it meant it mattered.

It mattered to me. Or it would not have hurt so.

Shouldn’t life matter? The deep marrow of it all?

I hear people say that there can be no love without pain. But I think in the end, what sticks with me is this:

My scars are painful. And real. And deep. And beautiful.

Each one broke me and cracked me open because it mattered. That moment mattered.

My scars are my legacy.