The Origin of Scars

I don’t buy short sleeve work shirts. No matter how hot it gets, I, like an Amish farmer, wear long sleeves with collars. It keeps the heat from my skin, I say. Keeps me cool, I say. The room where I teach English to legions of ninth grade students is stifling regardless of the season, and due to the presence of windows and the lack of air, it is more greenhouse than classroom. Yet I keep my cuffs buttoned; I keep my sleeves unrolled. I say I want my students to know that I am sweating more than they are. I say they won’t be able to complain. I say I showing them how to endure. But I don’t believe any of it. Even now, while sitting in the City Cafe with my wife, Claire, with the April sunshine streaming in the windows, I cover my arms.
By wearing long sleeves, I’m avoiding embarrassment, dodging questions, burying pain. I doing this because years ago, during several difficult times, I cut seventy-five vertical tallies into my flesh, making it more scoring sheet than arm. White and slightly raised, the remaining scars bring attention to an otherwise unremarkable appendage. It’s not so much that I am concerned they look ugly, which they do, or that people stare at them, which again, they do, but rather I’m ashamed at their mere existence. The reveal something dark about me, something gone wrong. They change the way people see me; make me less competent, less influential, less credible, less sure, and surely, less sane.
A scar is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as a “lingering sign of damage or injury” or “a lasting effect on a person of a former, unfortunate experience or condition.” “Scar” has both a literal and figurative meaning: literally, it is a physical sign; figuratively, a lingering effect. The scar as “sign” urges to be read -- that is, to be made meaningful; the scar as effect, meanwhile, yearns for cause. Like ancient runes, my scars scream for interpretation, yet I can’t find the Rosetta stone to decode them. Thus, they can’t be read. Thus, they can’t go away.
Against our wills, scars remain. They hold memories of accidents and obstacles. Recall Desdemona running her hands over Othello‘s body, while asking him to tell the story of his scars, thereby revealing the horrors of his life, releasing them from his memory, and healing him. I can do this with most of my scars: the gash in my forehead, for example, resulted from my inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, thus when I tried to swing from a high tree branch a la Tarzan, I landed head first on a root, and earned twenty-six stitches for my efforts; and the scar on the back of my head, which I received when Jimmy from down the street attended one Karate class, then proceeded to demonstrate a move, only to flip me so that the back of head sank into a rusty piece of angle iron. I could tell the stories of these scars with a beginning, middle and end -- how, it all began on a summer day.... I could give details -- how the red blood soaked my green T-ball shirt, and how my friend’s grandmother was so blind that even though my head and shirt were covered in blood, she asked me what was wrong. I could set a scene and develop characters; these scar’s stories reach conclusion -- their signs could be read, their effects explained. Because they have true stories, they have been healed. The scars on my arm, however, do not have a story, at least not a true one, at least not yet. They still cause me pain.
When people mistakenly glimpse the slices on my arm and ask for an explanation or an anecdote, I say they are the result of a farming accident. Got caught in some machinery, I say, as if the machine part explains their strange symmetry. Other times I say the scars are burns received from an acetylene torch when I worked construction. I then make an empty gesture with my thumb and forefinger holding an imaginary torch. I touch it on my arm, demonstrating how it may have happened. I don’t believe for a minute that people buy these explanations; they just recognize my discomfort and politely move on. They don’t believe the explanations because they lack detail and definition, character and context. The narratives are not convincing.
I began cutting myself when I was seventeen and continued until I was twenty-three. I don’t recall why. Was it self-hatred? Was it an attempt to manipulate my parents or my girlfriends? Was it a cry for help? An enactment of some primitive bloodletting ritual? A little sister of suicide? Did I think it would bring me calm, help me cope? Or did I just enjoy watching the bright red blood slowly fill into the shiny whiteness of the knife’s slits?
I’m not sure; I have no story.
Even as I scarred myself, I tried to discover why. The more I injured myself, the more I tried to understand. As a result I read a lot, too much, perhaps. I read novels, hoping to find lives and characters that would shed light on my situation. I read philosophers seeking to understand why a human being would be compelled to maim himself. I read psychology, looking for explanations. I even attended a seminar where self-mutilation was discussed. The experts, none of which admitted to be being a self-injurers herself, explained that “cutting” was a coping mechanism, that it affected slightly less than one percent of the population -- more likely females than males -- that most self-mutilators were highly intelligent, sensitive, overachieving, middle-class adolescents who more often than not, were also anorexic or bulimic. Hell, I even learned that Princess Diana was (she was alive then), as they refer to us, a “cutter,” and that cutting was, in fact, the “addiction of the nineties.” I wondered that if I started in ‘89, would that make me a trend setter. The seminar triggered something, but, I didn‘t want to know about Princess Diana, I wanted to know about me; I wanted a narrative that fit my life.
After telling a friend about the seminar, she suggested that I see a psychologist. Surely a therapist would help me read the signs and tell the story revealing the cause of the scars. I resisted. Being from a blue collar family who saw counseling as a sign of weakness, I viewed therapy as defeat. My family had little money, little status, and little respect, but a lot of pride. We had survived alcoholism, addiction, abuse, orphanages, and death through our own blind striving. Survival, however, is not recovery, my friend said, and I agreed.
Still, against my better judgment, I resisted. In fact, after college, I stopped looking for a story at all. Instead, I focused on survival and tried to build a life. After working for a while on a concrete gang and attending graduate school at night, I became a teacher, which enabled me to quiet the doubts in my head and engage students whose lives were worse than mine, and I fell in love, which encouraged me put the feelings of another before my own. At some point along the way, I stopped making a cutting board of my arm. I don’t remember making the decision consciously. I didn’t go through any ten-step programs. I just stopped. I married and became a productive member of society, more or less.
Still, many years later, I am sitting in a cafe, wearing long sleeves and wishing I knew why I stopped and, more importantly, why I began and if I am now “recovered” or “healthy.”
The sunlight is streaming through the windows. My wife, Claire, reaches across the table and attempts to slide my sleeves over my wrists. She stops suddenly saying “I’d forgotten” and me saying “Wish I could ” and then looking up into her eyes, then past them into the mirror on the back wall, seeing my reflection and from it, a story slowly forming:
A boy of five staring into a bathroom mirror feeling uncontrollable self-hatred, having witnessed his father pushing a gun into his mother’s hand, asking her to shoot him. The father, of course, a drunk; the father, of course, a cheat. The mother not shooting the father, the father leaving with the gun. The boy wondering if death will come. The mother, in overwhelming frustration, beating her children and suffering nervous breakdowns, and sobbing on the floor, and the children -- five of them, the boy included, hiding in various corners, alone. The boy, feeling helpless, eyeing his reflection, then no longer able to stand its presence, scratching its face, his own face bleeding. The mother not noticing. The boy growing older, continuing to self-abuse, but weary of scratching, finding punching more purgative. The boy giving himself a concussion, lying saying it happened playing ball. The parents fighting; his father drinking, finding Jesus, drinking again, nailing himself to the cross, drinking again. All the while the boy trying to be successful, feeling that being good in school and sport will least take it away, keep people away, thinking its just easier, quieter to succeed. Growing older still, the perfect student, the accomplished athlete. Still, in weaker moments for reasons he can’t explain, cutting himself on his arms, then being more wise, his legs with a serrated knife, a present from his father. Having friends and girlfriends, but, out of shame, keeping them from getting too close. His parents praising him, still fighting. Graduating as valedictorian of his class. continuing to cut. Winning a college scholarship, exploring new areas for slicing on the chest, figuring why not. Embarrassed and ashamed, wearing long sleeve shirts on hot days, everyone else, tanning. Other students trying to connect, he, repelling, thinking he is outclassed and outcast. Winning the departmental award, graduating summa cum laude, but believing it all is nothing, cutting himself. Finally, finding there is no future, only a present, and diving in, taking a job on a concrete gang --jack hammering concrete fifty hours a week, more if he‘s lucky, alienating his family, acting like an asshole, feeling his world spiraling out of control, but not caring, not caring, but not cutting either. Swallowing his pride, meeting a woman, her loving him, despite his failures and despite his job and despite his scars. Blame his parents, and forgiving his parents and for the first time in his life, looking at himself and not thinking, “dumb, stupid, idiotic, self-pitying .”

A story, or a treatment a least. Simple and sappy, but with a beginning, and a middle. True, not an end, but I’m not ready for that. It has detail and definition, though admittedly, there are still holes. Yet I believe I will fill them. I have, at least, begun to read the grammar of these white lines and discover what it speaks about my past. I going to remember this story, fix it in my mind and build on it, starting now.
I shift my glance back into Claire’s eyes, she smiles, and I guide her hands toward my sleeves. She unbuttons my cuffs and I roll my sleeves and I feel the sun on my arms and it heals.