I’ve always been prone to accidents, part of it is me being impatient and wanting to do things too fast and all at once, and part of it is genuinely dangerously bad spatial awareness. As child I skinned my knees so often that they never got to heal… and even now, they are full of scars. One time I was so eager to get my easter eggs that I climbed on top of my bedroom cabinet… that was not properly secured and came tumbling down on top of me. I still have little dip on the left side of my head from where it hit me. When I was 9, I fell down the swing and broke my arm (surprisingly the only thing I ever broke), I had to wear a cast for weeks, in the heat of the summer… Once I finally took it off, I stumbled down the slide on a pedal boat, and I got a huge scar on the upper part of my arm that stayed for years. Years later, when I lived in Poland, I miscalculated the distance between the fridge and the wall when I was turning around, and I hit my head so hard against the wall that my roommate started crying because she was afraid I was going to pass out. Even now, as a full-grown woman, I find myself bumping into door frames, furniture, and random walls more often than I would care to admit.
For all the reasons above, my physical scars never bother me, I understood them, I knew where they came from, they had a story. What always got to me were the emotional ones.
For someone with, for most standards, such a stable, uneventful upbringing, I sure managed to hoard my fair share of emotional scars. And what bugged me for the longest time was not finding a reason for it, not feeling that they were justified, like I was too privileged to feel any sort of negative emotion. I also wanted to take ownership of my issues and felt that finding the root cause of my emotional issues meant blaming others for it. The thing is emotional scars, just like the physical ones, appear for a reason, they have a background, and denying them doesn’t benefit anyone. Identifying the causes of your emotional scars is not about placing blame. Understanding where they come from doesn’t mean you are blaming someone else, just like knowing what led to the damaged skin of your knee doesn’t mean you blame the asphalt you fell on.
(Feb 6th 2024)
