Scar Tissue

In many ways, we glorify scars in our society. They’re cool, they’re unique, when they’re on a guy they’re attractive to women supposedly. Well, the right kind of scar, anyway. And you have to have a good story for it. How you were doing something daring, or heroic, or something that makes you a rebel. Personally, I really don’t have many scars on me. I have surgery scars from the chest surgery I had when I was 12. Like many folks around my age, I have some faint markers where a pencil fight went wrong and there’s a little bit of graphite in my skin. Not exactly tales of great renown. But we always focus on physical scars. There’s so much more beneath the surface, stuff we don’t talk about, that we’re taught are taboo and shameful. We carry these things with us, markers of our painful history, unseen and often untreated for years. We bury them, try to cover them over, try to pretend they aren’t there or convince ourselves we weren’t affected like that, sometimes so long we forget. These are the scars I’m going to talk about today. So, let’s talk about the mental scars of trauma.

Reality is a fickle thing, from a mental perspective. Our minds are capable of creating such intricate filters that we can believe something that we mostly made up, or disbelieve something right in front of our eyes, solely because of what our brains are processing. So much of what we get from the world attaches to expectations and patterns we think we’ve seen. These extra things we attach, often completely unconsciously, change things. It’s like mirrors in a Funhouse (a name I use loosely), reflecting back to us what’s there, but in a way that is changed by the surface and shape of the mirror. Mental scars warp our ability to process in a similar way. And the shape of them decides the ways in which reality appears to us afterward.

It’s hard, in many cases, to determine when it’s happening. Sometimes, it’s hard to even understand that the way in which you relate to a word or phrase is wildly different from the people around you. This happened to me very recently. A little while ago, I came across a post in which the author described feeling like a partner is “home” to them. A sense of comfort and ease, of being able to just settle in around them, feeling safe and able to relax. I shared this with T and C, because I really liked it and felt it was something that is so often lost in the way we as a general society talk about relationships. That has come up in a few conversations over the last few weeks for various reasons. Just last night, it came up again. I had a rough mental day yesterday, and spent some time isolating in my bedroom and just letting it run its course, but later in the day T came in to check on me and stayed with me for a bit. For most of the day, I’d been in a pretty strong dissociative state, and I was able to pass it off as tiredness from difficulty sleeping and a physical toll from healing from a couple new piercings I’ve gotten over the past couple weeks. This changed after a few minutes of T holding me in bed.

I sobbed. The kind that wrack your body and double you over. They kept coming. Eventually they ebbed, giving me time to breathe a little bit and recover. T and I talked, mostly her since I was all kinds of raw. She asked me what was wrong, what was going on that caused that reaction, and I didn’t really know. I told her about the insecurities that were running through my mind that are always lurking, about relationships and why anyone would stay with me, and about needing to provide some kind of value to think my partners have any reason to want me around. That’s when she talked about feeling like home, and how I felt like home for her. It was the first time I’d been the subject of it. The first time *I’d* been the one being told they feel like home. And here’s where I realized one of those mental scars was playing tricks on me.

T talked about feeling safe with me, and in our relationship. As she described it, talking about what she felt, a growing sense comprised of both some level of horror and of comprehension took hold in me. I don’t know what “safe” feels like in that sense. I don’t think I know *how* to feel it. I’ve spent my life guarded, creating connections with people and lifting them up, but leaving myself in a place where I could extract myself when it was time, when they could rely on other, less broken people, because I wasn’t ever the important one, it was about putting others in a better place and letting them flourish, then moving on again, repeating the cycle. I’ve known I do this for a while, and a whole lot of things have come up as “why”s. But this one, this idea of “safe”, hit a different note.

I have made vague allusions to this in the past, but long story short? My father was abusive. In some ways physically, in a *lot* of ways mentally and emotionally. My family, who I looked to as a means of trying to make sense of any of it, were all suffering in their own ways, and often fell back to that idea that you *have* to stay with family, all the apologetics that could be found to say it wasn’t that bad, and I should recognize he *loves* me and he’s *trying* to find ways to show it and all those things that normalized the abuse. This went on for close to 30 years in some form or another. One of my parents, someone who was supposed to teach me what love is and how it feels, turned me into something for his own ends and amusement. The other people who were supposed to love me found ways to defend him, to convince me I had to forgive and let him stay in my life, probably to some extent as measures of their own defenses against guilt and the sense that they’d have to confront things if I started the ball rolling. I never learned how to feel safe in the idea of love. I never learned how to believe someone cares for me beyond what I can do for them tangibly. This has been reinforced in some ways by other relationships in my life, but this is undeniably the catalyst.

My struggles around my gender identity and, eventually, coming out built on this. In many of my close relationships, it affected how I was able to relate to people. In some, it was a crisis point, something I inflicted on the other person that they couldn’t bear, and it had to end. In others, it was an inconvenience, a complication that made their lives harder, so I would do everything I could to diminish myself and diminish the impact my transition had. I became apologetic for being who I was to people close to me. I don’t think I even recognized this for years, until very recently. It was just another thing that I made up for, another way in which I wanted to “prove” that I was worth being around for a while, in spite of being trans.

All of this came pouring out last night. I could finally recognize the landscape of the mental scar I have been left with. I could finally put a name to it, finally understand what made it *so hard* to believe I was worth having as a partner, after so much time trying to fight to get there through all kinds of other paths, *knowing* my partners have told me outright that they want to be with me, that they chose me. Knowing that it caused them stress and no small amount of frustration that I struggled to allow them that, practically asserting I knew better and denying them that agency.

I was lied to for years about what love is. I was shown something and told it was love so that someone could get what they wanted, satisfy their own desires, or punish me if I didn’t live up to that. My place in that love was never safe. I could never trust it. And I learned to see love as that thing. I learned to believe it could and would be rescinded in an instant. I’d have to earn it back, demonstrating I knew my place. That wound never quite healed right. My perception never fully shifted. Love has existed in a shade of that form in my mind ever since. I know that now, which is an important step, and I can begin working on it. But it will take work, and determination, and time. I have to begin the process of healing from that scar.

This is just one of my mental scars. There are others, some I know and almost definitely some I don’t. There are many forms these scars can take, many ways they can impact a life. They can be very deep, and hard to see, and they can be extremely hard to correct for once you find them. We all have them, something, somewhere, in some part of our mind. Talking about them is important, normalizing their existence is vital. Healing is a hard, and sometimes violent, process, but it is so incredibly necessary. However, it is impossible to heal a wound or a scar you can never seek treatment for. I have shown mine. Find someone you trust, or a good therapist, and show them yours. Start healing. And show others that they can too.