Dancing might be one of the most dangerous things one could do in the shower.
I was ten when I decided to tap dance in the bathtub. The water from the shower gradually made the floor slippery. I already knew the possible consequences of my actions, but the music was hard to ignore. The next thing I knew, I was on the floor and my left elbow bleeding. It just so happened to land exactly on the sharpest part of the bathtub.
A weird dark spot formed on the same area a few weeks later. That was the first of many scars I would get growing up—the catch was, my scars get harder to see.
Scars come in all shapes and forms, and sometimes we get scars in the most unusual places. We can hide them under clothes or makeup, making them essentially invisible to prying eyes. Yet there will always be one person who knows they exist: ourselves.
No matter how hard we try to ignore their existence, they are still there, just hidden from sight. They could be scars from a fall we had as children, or they could even be emotional scars from the pressure placed on us by our parents. Everyone has their own inner struggles that they try to overcome; but sometimes, they don’t always win in the end. Sometimes in the course of the fight, people get wounded. And sometimes those wounds turn into scars.
My uncle unknowingly stepped on the pinky toe of my right foot a few years ago. Wearing steel-toe boots, he had flattened my toe into oblivion, crushing its nail and ending my foot modeling career. After it bled for 30 minutes, a crooked dark red nail was all that remained of my fifth toe. Every now and then, whenever I cut my toenails, I would catch a glimpse of my disfigured toe, reminding me of the excruciating pain I felt when my uncle’s boots crushed it.
The more scars I received, the more cautious I became with how I looked. This society is one that doesn’t look kindly on the disfigured and admires the beautiful, and as I grew up with the constant mockery and discouragement, I became more aware that I was considered by society as the former.
Different forms of media associate scars with bad guys and rejects, something no one wants to be compared to. I cannot necessarily say that there are people who feel the same way as I do. Maybe it’s all just in my head, but I can always feel invisible eyes judging me for the scars that I carry and the uneasiness I feel makes me want to hide them.
Despite my worries, my mother always knows how to calm my nerves. Her words give me clarity, even when I pretend I don’t listen to her advice at all. As a child that constantly disobeys his parents, these imperfections never once caused her to doubt me. She accepts all the scars I bear with me, not just the scars on my arms and legs, but even the ones on my heart. My mother, who probably carries more scars than I do, never once failed to tell me how perfect I am to her.
I realized that she bears scars just like I do. And like me, she also tries to hide it. Yet no matter how hard she tries, I can still see the scars on her hands for working so hard, the scars on her womb from delivering children, and even the scars on her heart for the dreams that she had to give up. What’s worse is that I am filled with too much pride and ego to tell her how beautiful she really is, even with all her scars.
Wounds hurt, that’s true. And for some, that pain could last a long time. For others, they last an infinitesimally short time. Sometimes those wounds scar—yet, a scar is a wound already healed. I look to people like my mother, and realize that although scars serve as reminders, they’re not here to remind us of the pain we felt at the moment. Rather, they remind us of how human we really are: that we bleed and that we are alive.
