WHAT YOU DO WITH THE SCARS
EPISODE 031: WHAT YOU DO WITH THE SCARS
Most of us have no shortage of scars, some are on the outside, some are on the inside, hidden but no less painful. Many of us are ashamed of these scars, we hide them, scared they make us damaged and vulnerable when in fact they show how resilient we are and can be, if we let them, a deep well in which we find the best of our art, our stories, and the hope and light we offer to others. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
After several surgeries on my feet and a run-in with an axe in the Canadian arctic, my ankles are a mess. One scar, dark and skin-puckered gets referred to irreverently, but not inappropriately, in our home as the cat’s asshole. Another as Frankenstein, having been opened a couple times to add, change, and remove some of the hardware in there. That hardware, in X-rays, looks like the junk left over in an Ikea box when you’ve just built a chair and are pretty sure you’re not meant to have 6 screws, 3 nuts, and a washer left over, but there it is all the same and you might need it one day, so it joins the others in the a drawer against the inevitable day when you're 2 screws and a washer short. We call the scar Frankenstein because it’s been sewn up so many times the stitch lines just kind of gave up trying to hide themselves.
My name is David duChemin, and this is A Beautiful Anarchy, a mostly-weekly podcast about the creative life. What’s it got to do with my scars? Let’s talk about it.
The third of four scars on my ankles is a big L-shaped line that somehow never got a name. All three of them are the ugly leftovers from a fall I took in Italy 9 years ago. The fourth came when an axe glanced off a piece of wood I was chopping, and though it felt like I’d been half-heartedly hit with a baseball bat, the axe cut through my pants, and my boot, and deep into my ankle, which set us to striking camp around midnight and heading down the Yukon’s forbidding Dempster Highway dodging pot holes that could swallow a moose, while keeping an eye open for those same moose. We drove into Dawson City, which despite the name is barely a town and has no hospital. It does have a nurse if you can find her, which we we did after going to the police station which was very dark and very closed, but had a phone on the wall outside to call Whitehorse which is over an hour away, in hopes they might send someone, which they eventually did and sewed me up at 3 in the morning.
Like I said, my ankles are a mess. But there are other scars too. I’ve got a crescent moon on my right thumb, put there with a Swiss Army knife when I was about 8 on a camping trip in Nova Scotia. I’ve got a similar-shaped scar above one of my eyes, though I can never remember which one because when I look in the mirror left becomes right and vice versa and apparently it’s easier just to go look in the mirror than to remember these things.
I got that one when I was roped into being a referee at a hockey game and had to borrow a pair of skates that hadn’t been sharpened since the game was invented and at the opening face off I dropped the puck and, to the amazement of the crowd, then did a complete front flip as my skates shot out from under me and I cunningly stopped my forward momentum with my face. So that’s where that one came from. It keeps company with the others, and the three small scars that testify to my gallbladder's departure, and the one from a hernia repair, and the ones on my knees from learning to ride a bike. Oddly, there are a couple that I look at and for the life of me I can’t remember where they came from.
This inventory of scars is a little like an evidence locker in one of those cops shows, though they testify to different things. Some of them are incontrovertible proof of my own stupidity. Some are a witness to my inability to grasp basic physics or the law of gravity. And some to the fact that my body, too, is subject to the same kind of wear and tear as the rest of creation.
Those are the scars you can see. There are many more under the surface; they’re in my heart and mind, and I’m betting you’ve got a few yourself. The scars I carry on the inside, the emotional ones wrapped in memories don’t hurt the way my ankles do when it gets cold and wet out, it’s a different hurt and they ache at the strangest times. They remind me, when I’m least expecting it, of mistakes and losses, failures and betrayals, both those I've suffered and those I have caused. I can tell the difference because most of the time it's the pangs from the latter that hurt more.
One of the advantages of getting older is that the pain from the external scars mostly fades. There are still a couple where I’ve lost some of the sensation, and they feel strange when I touch them, but mostly they’re like the creases in once-bent-over pages in any of the books on my shelf, they’re the dog-ears and chapter markers, of a well-loved story that was too large to read in one sitting. At least the ones you can see. The ones on the inside remain sensitive for longer, but they aren’t the bent pages, they’re a bigger part of the story. They’re a reminder of the twists and turns of the plot and the shitty things authors sometimes do to their characters or allow their characters to do to others and themselves. We’re all in our own story and the best stories have always depended on some pretty hard moments. They’re nasty things to live through, but they make us who we are and I suppose it’s better than living a story no one wants to read, a story with nothing to risk but also nothing to gain, though that’s small comfort at the time.
I have never been ashamed of my scars. Perhaps I always bought the line that "chicks dig scars". I see that jagged zippered line across my foot and I hear Indian Jones telling Marianne, "It ain't the years, it’s the mileage, baby." The scars don’t only testify to my missteps but to my resilience and to lessons learned. When I was a kid I had occasion to write lines on the board: I will not run in the halls, I will not run in the halls, I will not run in the halls. Write that a hundred times and you might begin to slow down in the halls, though probably not for long. But these scars are lines written in flesh and most of them only needed writing once. They are reminders of some of the more interesting, if not also painful, lessons and detours in my life, hints to some of the greatest victories, and they are now the source of the best I have to offer as a writer and a human being, most especially the scars on the inside.
These dents and scratches are not something I regret, at least not now that I’ve lived with them a while and the pain that created them has faded. They remind me that what doesn’t kill us only gives us something to blog about, that the last thing I need to worry about when it comes to this body is re-sale value at the end. They remind me that I am not the good china, only to be used on special occasions. They remind me too, that things that are well-loved are well used, and probably show it.
I don’t WANT to get to the end in pristine condition, but rather well-loved and full of stories, and to do that there’s a good chance some of the parts will be hanging by a thread toward the end, which I very much hope is a long way off.
I guess what I’m saying is that when we stop seeing our scars, whatever they are, as a thing that was done to us, a reminder only of the pain, and the past, and an unfixable scratch on the paint that lowers the value, or makes us unsightly, unlovable, or unusable, and we begin to see them, instead, as qualifications and patina, and evidence of a life well-lived, and well-learned, we might begin to dip into the great wealth of those experiences and find in them the raw materials for our art.
I once read a great line from writer Madeleine L’Engle that said something brilliant to the effect that as we go though life we all suffer injuries but that the most grievous harm, far greater than the original hurt, is caused by how we react to them. She was pointing to the tendency to hide our scars, to build walls around the more tender parts, to become self-protective and ashamed, and to retreat away from risk, and in so-doing we begin to shrivel, to become numb, and to atrophy. That is the true damage.
I don’t know if you have to suffer to be an artist. I suspect that’s partly true, but that’s not exactly setting the bar very high, is it? I mean, everyone suffers. No one is immune from the bumps and bruises of life. Some of us encounter far more pain and loss than we ever thought we could bear. Some people live enough hard stories to fill a library and I don’t want to romanticize pain, and suffering or imply that there’s some golden nugget in all of it that makes it easier to bear. But I think it's important we acknowledge it, to be unflinching in our acceptance of it as having happened, as ALWAYS happening, both to ourselves and others, and to look it in the eye and refuse to allow it to kill our spirits.
And if art is on your mind, if making something larger than your pain and bigger than your scars matters to you, then it doesn’t matter whether you have to suffer as an artist. It matters whether you’re willing to share it, to use it, and to roll up the sleeves and show your scars rather than hide them. Because somewhere out there are other timid souls freshly wounded and wondering if they’ll make it through, wondering if this won’t just kill them dead on the spot, and they don’t have the benefit of hindsight; they can’t, right in the middle of their doubt and fear, look at the scars that’ll one day form around this present hurt and see a promise of their own resilience. But they can look at yours. They can hear your story and skirt the despair when they’re standing at the edge of it. Our scars can be an ugly, bright, and holy hope, if we let them be seen.
I think the greatest gift of the artist is the generosity of spirit and courage that we so often mistakenly call a willingness to be vulnerable. It is, I think, only a willingness to feel vulnerable, because these scarred places, both inside and out, aren’t areas of weakness at all but of strength. These scars and the scars of others willing to quietly show them to the similarly-wounded are not signs of our vulnerability but of our resilience.
Suffering doesn’t make the artist. We all suffer. And it’s not the paint or the words or the guitars or the pencils that make the artist, either. It’s what you do with the scars.
Thank you so much for joining me today. If this podcast matters to you in some way, I’d be grateful if you shared it with others, and even though the podcast takes a break every 4th week, there’s no reason you shouldn’t still get your weekly kick in the creative pants. I’d love to send you On The Make on those 4th weeks and you can get that by going to ABeautifulAnarchy.com, scrolling to the bottom and telling me where to send it. At the same time I’ll also send you a copy of my eBook, Escape Your Creative Rut, 5 Ways To Get Your Groove Back. and every month I’ll draw the name of one subscriber to whom I’ll send a signed copy of my book, A Beautiful Anarchy. Thanks so much for being part of this. Until next time, go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0