Scars

CONTENT ADVISORY: Discussions of suicide attempts, behavioral health conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder, psychiatric imprisonment and self-mutilation, including cutting, piercing and tattooing. Graphic descriptions of cutting.

Another prose experiment from graduate school, a lot has changed since I first wrote it. I later had an unsuccessful piercing and tattoo: a cartilage ring that caused a keloid bump I had to go to a clinic to remove and get cortico-steroid injections for; and a gray Sankofa symbol (the gold one at the bottom of all my web pages) over one wrist that faded into a barely visible light shadow. I also have had an abdominal surgery that left a vertical line from below my navel that went keloid as well, adding to my body’s collection of scars.

Sometimes I think about putting tattoos over the scars on my wrists. The scars are thin, double–pointed spikes along the length of my wrist, tapered at the ends, wider in the middle. They are a little lighter than my untouched skin; their smooth pore-lessness shines a little in the light. The one on the left wrist is about two inches long, about an inch longer than the one on the right.

There is another scar on the left side of my throat, right under jaw, below my ear. It’s about an inch long. It’s hard for me to find and point out for myself; I don’t worry much about people noticing it.

I have other marks on my flesh that set me apart from other bodies: a small brown birthmark bleeding from the iris of my left eye, bumps on the sides of my pinkies left over from amputated extra fingers. When people ask about those marks, I feel proud of being different as I explain them. But the scars whenever somebody points at them and asks “What happened to you?” I shiver inside, like an ice cube choking my throat. I never was a liar, or even good at concealing things.

When I was an undergraduate, a co–worker in my work-study job asked about my wrists. She wasn’t a pal of mine, not yet. I said to her calmly, “Suicide attempt.” She gasped quietly, and gave me a little squeeze of compassion. We became good buddies later, though we never talked about it again.

*

I used to like to see my blood run.

I’ve felt it run fresh and warm on my neck, across my shoulder and breast, down my leg. When I cut my throat, I had to gouge into it a few times with the razor blade before the blood rushed out suddenly, a stream hitting the floor fast like a weight.

When I first sank blades into my flesh, I was in pain. Not from the cuts, but from my own interior wounds, scabs grown old but never healed. The hurt throbbing in my head was so huge that I don’t remember the sensation of the cuts I made; I was so intent on seeking death as the ultimate painkiller.

I hated myself and my life. Trauma and misery were my steady companions since childhood, and by the time I was in my late–teens and early twenties, I was sure they would never leave me alone. So I assaulted my body with a viciousness of someone who had no reason to care about its consequences. I didn’t think about surviving another day with my body forever marked. I just wanted the pain to go away. I wanted the memories to go away. I saw no chance of living a good life, a happy life, a free life.

Seeing and feeling the blood on my skin was an unexpected release in itself. Surviving to face high hospital bills and psychiatric imprisonment ended the serious suicide attempts, but not the cutting. Sinking in my quiet agony, I would sometimes go to the store and buy a package of old-fashioned single-edge blades. In the isolation of my bedroom, I would undress and lie in bed on my back. Slowly, carefully, I would draw thin red lines on my belly with the fresh blade, looking for them to heal without scaring.

Though it’s been years since I last cut myself, the pain I was trying to relieve is still within me. The names that my therapist give for what I feel are dysthymia and post–traumatic stress disorder. I am vigilant and, so far, successful in fighting the chronic dull sadness that distinguishes dysthymia as a form of depression. But the pain comes from the PTSD, and that comes from the memories that I will not tell here. The act of writing about myself makes my eyes burn with the tears I don’t feel like shedding and my head burns with holding back the pain like a mental dam.

I want to express what I feel and be free to let the memories play through my thoughts, but I’m scared I won’t be able to function. The last time I let that happen, I checked myself into a hospital mental health ward at the urging of my partner. The flashbacks from past involuntary commitments made staying there almost unbearable as I waited out the weekend for the physician on duty to return.

Three days later, when I asked to check myself out after the physician forgot to see me and left for the day, the nurse told me that because I was a suicide risk, I could not leave the hospital against medical advice. Talking to me as if I were three years old, she asked, “You’re not just saying this so you can get out and kill yourself, are you?”

After I threatened to write a complaint, the doctor saw me promptly the next morning. About an hour later, a nurse was unlocking the ward’s heavy metal barricade to let me out. Even as a voluntary admission, I was still a prisoner.

*

My sister got a tattoo on her chest a few years ago. It’s a big unicorn. She was enthusiastic about getting the tattoo beforehand, but afterwards she told me that it hurt like hell and she’d never get another one.

My sister has three holes for earrings in one ear and four in the other — one high up on her ear in the gristle, and I’ve heard that hurts like hell. I wouldn’t know anything about it: I’ve never had any piercings, not in my ears or anywhere.

When I was a kid, I watched as my little sister got the first two holes shot into each earlobe at the local K–Mart. She smiled through the whole thing, but I wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t painful. Growing up, I saw enough scabby infections, split earlobes, keloid bumps and off–center piercings to be glad that my ears weren’t pierced as a baby like so many parents do now. As a young adult, I enjoyed the uniqueness of being a woman with unpierced ears.

Needles, rings and studs are stuck through body parts. Multicolored scars are drawn into the skin. Breaking the human flesh and leaving permanent marks for all the world to see is acceptable if the ultimate purpose is achieving some ideal of beauty, even one that many people may not share.

In a telephone consultation, one tattoo artist tells me it’s possible to work with scars, depending on their age and condition. At a tattoo parlor in Kansas City, I’m told that nothing can hide or cover up scars.

*

My ex-lover used to be a junky. Before we met, I told her on the phone about my scars; she said that when we got together, we could compare them with the remnants of the tracks in her arms. When we closed the bedroom door and shed our clothes together for first time, I was disappointed in the sight of the little shadows on the inside of each elbow. They used to go all the way up to shoulder, she said. She later told me about junkies who would try to cover their tracks with tattoos; she said it only made the tracks look worse.

*

In the back of my mind rests a photograph from Our Bodies, Ourselves of a woman proudly displaying a single breast and a mastectomy line artfully traced with a dragon-like outline. I want to be as bold in being a suicide attempt survivor, and to present my arms as warrior marks, to show myself as winning an ongoing psychic battle. But I don’t really feel so victorious.

I feel shame sometimes, and want to hide them. But that’s sometimes. Most of the time, I don’t feel like expending the energy that shame requires. I don’t dress in long sleeves all the time, like my lover once did to hide her tracks in the Los Angeles heat. I don’t even think about them all the time; it hurts too much.