The Scars That Make Us
It was an absurdly hot night in July, and I was awake in bed, having a panic attack (you know, as one does.)
It had been a rough couple of months, the heat non-withstanding. I had just gotten off of a stint as a student teacher, which ended up being nothing more to me than just eight months of the slow degradation of my already waning mental health—the particular kind of stress when you know the education of over a hundred teenagers is up to you and one move will either leave them with lasting knowledge or a spot on the “These Twitter Users Told Us About Their Worst Teachers Ever, And #8 is a Big WTF?!” Buzzfeed article of the day. It doesn’t help that while I had been teaching high schoolers, I felt like I was back in high school myself, with teachers sitting the home economics room during lunch, gossiping about which teachers were terrible at their jobs, outright calling their students idiots. My mentor teacher was nice enough, but I always felt like she was racking up my flaws in a refined list in her head. I knew when I didn’t join her in the home economics room for lunch, it was me she and her friends ended up complaining about. It was all enough to make me wonder, as I walked into my classroom every day, if the fork I was using for my leftover plain rice for lunch was better suited for stabbing myself in the neck and calling it a day.
Somehow, I had made it through, though I knew even as I filled out applications, finished up tests for my certification and took summer classes, I wasn’t ever going to be a teacher. I spoke to family members and posted on my social media accounts as if I was, but that was all because I knew coming out like the fraud I was would only make things worse. Everyone already thought I was a sham since I had originally gone to school for two useless degrees. The teaching certification was my ticket out of those condescending conversations and pitying looks, for I wouldn’t just be another hopeless snake person lost to the snowflake lie of “follow your dreams.” I’d actually make something of myself, be a productive member of society. So, I kept applying, even though I knew if any of my halfhearted attempts got me an interview (much less a job,) I would probably turn it down. I remember sitting in my bath tub, marinating in lukewarm water, sobbing, wondering exactly what I was going to do, what my future would look like.
It was only a month or so later that I found out I was pregnant.
Most people would view that as yet another stressor on top of the mountain of stressors, but for me, it was the answer. The answer to the looming question that was rattling through my brain at all hours of the day: “what comes next?” Finally, there it was. My husband and I didn’t have a lot of money, but maybe we didn’t need any. Maybe everything would start falling into place now that we had something on the horizon that we needed to take care of.
It’s hard for me to write that now, to think that a child should be used as some sort of saving grace for a sad mid-twenties depressive with nothing in her savings account. I’m glad I’ve grown, to see how selfish and idiotic I was for thinking that. It makes me cringe, though, like pressing on an old bruise. But that’s what I really thought about it. It was a blessing, not just another failure to add to my list.
And almost as fast as I had found out I was pregnant, I wasn’t any more.
That week in my life was a blur. I went back and forth from a summer class to doctor’s offices, nearly every day, hoping that the blood tests they ran were wrong, praying (because I did that still back then) that it would be some kind of miracle situation. It wasn’t. It ended in a hospital room with a needle in my hip. That was the day same sex marriage was made legal. I remember the hospital TV playing footage of the celebrations. I wanted so much to be happy, too, but I knew that day in history—which would hold so much joy for other people—would only hold pain for me.
That night in July—only a few weeks after—was one in a string of nights that I found myself curled up in my sheets, wailing, struggling to take a breath, roiling against what felt like a giant reaching inside me and wrenching at my organs. This unseen assailant would visit at random times—at work when I would see a young couple and their new baby passing on the sidewalk, at a restaurant when the wrong song would play over the radio, and especially at night, when I was alone. My husband was working third shift, leaving me to sit alone in the dark every night, nothing but my thoughts of failure ringing in my ears. I couldn’t hack it as a teacher, as a citizen of the world. My body couldn’t even do the one thing it was supposed to be able to do, at its base level.
So what exactly could I do? Was it even worth it to keep breathing?
These fits would sometimes last five minutes, ten, twenty, thirty. That summer night wasn’t particularly bad. There were worse ones before it and worse ones after. But I got up to use the bathroom, eyes still bleary from tears. When I walked back into my dark bedroom, I wasn’t much paying attention where I was going, and frankly, I wasn’t caring much either. That’s when the sharp pain jabbed into my leg.
I remember falling onto my bed, paralyzed by the sudden jolt running through my shin. As soon as I could right myself, I hobbled over to the light switch and looked down. A ridiculous sized gash sat open on my left shin. My bed frame was too big for the mattress we used, causing the end of it to jut out, uncovered. Every time I warily passed by it, I joked how one night it would get me, and I supposed, while I sat on my floor, my leg exposed to the world, that night was the night.
I stared at it for a bit. It wasn’t bleeding. Maybe a little, but not nearly as much as it should have for as big of a gash as it was. It just sat there, throbbing and inviting. It took me a moment to even have the thought of cleaning it out with disinfectant and bandaging it up. As I crawled back into bed, the wound pulsed, angry and present, but sleep found me so quickly that night that it’s hilarious for me to think about now. The actual pain I felt was so much more bearable than that wrenching feeling in my gut, it was practically a lullaby to me that night.
Five years later, I still have a scar on my leg. It doesn’t hurt any more, of course. Perhaps it itches every now and then, maybe it will get a bit sore if I knock it just right. I don’t even hardly notice it unless my pant leg rides up or I’m shaving my legs. It’s still there, no longer angry and open faced, but dull and grey. Not particularly beautiful, but if I were to wake up tomorrow and realize it was gone, I don’t know if I would be happy about it. It’s part of me now, a reminder of all those nasty thoughts and things that happened back then. It’s strange because when I think of who I was when I got the scar, it doesn’t even feel like me. So much else has happened in the five years that have passed—I moved to a new city, got a new (non-teaching) job, bought a house. All these things that girl in the dark of her empty apartment never thought were possible.
In some ways, I am a wholly different person than I was back then. They say all the cells in your body completely replace themselves every seven years. So perhaps biologically, I am a totally new person, give or take a couple of years. But all those scars—the ones you can see and the ones you can’t—are still there, holding me together, like stitching on a homemade doll. I am an amalgamation of so many different thoughts, experiences, tragedies, comedies, odds and ends. And the ways they were put together and knitted into the person I am now, while painful at times, make all the difference. To think, that person on that summer night, twisting and turning in her bed, didn’t want them.
I have so many more scars in store for me. I know this. And I know eventually, it’s going to be worth getting every single one of them.
