Scar

So when the student pushed me in the morning, I taught the rest of the day, holding on with fingertips until, alone, I would fall end over end into whatever chasm of feeling awaited me. 

As I headed toward my car, I passed behind a van parked in the bus lane, shuddered, staggered, kept walking.  Into the unmarked metal wheelchair lift on the back of the van, I had walked full stride.

Yesterday, I had the scar removed that replaced the part of me taken that day.

The scar ended up, after two leg-swelling infections, ill-healed, a small, thick continent below my knee, white, icy, numb.

Today it aches as it should have a year and a half ago, as if I had taken myself to the emergency room, had the wide-open wound bathed, then stitched closed.  As if a normal woman, having received an injury--however it occurred--sought care.

My pattern is to believe I must protect others from my feelings of weakness, fear, and pain, and protect myself from what they might do, feel, or think as a result of learning that I have these feelings.  When The Anne Show isn’t what others want, need, or expect, I have seen the tomatoes of disappointment, contempt, even rage skid across the stage.

I got in my car, drove home, rinsed the oozing opening in my leg with hot, soapy water, trembled, waited.

My doctor said he couldn’t recreate my shin as if the injury had never happened.  He said, “We can change it.”

A mentor in Tampa talked often of transforming experience.  He was a proponent of the importance of self-candor with regard to experience, particularly troubling experience.  He believed that one’s truth, if kept in the dark, stayed ominously without shape, preying on the very human fear of the unknown.  When brought to the light, however painfully, the truth could be seen for what it was.  Its dimensions could be measured.  Then it could be transformed and integrated into one’s life.  Otherwise, the truth would operate threateningly on the edge of one’s life, requiring constant vigilance, requiring energy-sapping arm’s-length wariness and rejection.

While I am not enjoying the ache in my shin, I am at peace with it.  It’s for a reason.  It’s for transformation.

Yesterday was my first experience with out-patient surgery, but not my first experience with anesthetizing a part of my life while the rest of me is conscious, of sensing something hard and sharp happening, of an arms-length stretching and pulling that nobody could take and not be distressed by, but not being able to feel it.  And of knowing the future would be pain.

Just like the day the student pushed me.  Just like the day I didn’t see the van.

While I lay on the surgery table, the nurse reached out and stroked the back of my hand.  I was doing the strong, optimistic side of The Anne Show.  I wasn’t crying.  Still, I wanted to turn my hand into hers and grip it.  But I feared my clammy, sweaty palm would be unwelcome in hers.  So I didn’t.

***

But I thought about it.

For me, that’s transformation.  Even if scar-sized.

Comments

[scar treatment removal]

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