I'm a chef and throughout my time of employment in professional kitchens I've acquired some pretty cruel looking scars. Some of them are actually pretty disturbing. Cuts, burns...once they scar, they all look the same. Some of my wounds were so bad at times that when I was out in public, I would get "looks" from people. I can remember one time when I went into a sandwich shop that I frequent and the guy working behind the counter saw some burns on my hand that I had gotten a few days prior. They were pretty bad looking. I was taking some pasta out of the pot of boiling water we use and I hadn't noticed that one of the line cooks had moved a cast iron skillet full of hot oil right next to it. Well, water splashing into hot oil = fire. Fire = burns. The fire shot up and burnt my hand up pretty bad. I was holding a pan of sauce in one hand and the pasta in the other. I couldn't set them down anywhere because there wasn't any room and I couldn't drop them because, well, the customers probably wouldn't be too happy. So, I got pretty bad burns.
Anyway, the guy behind the counter thought I got into a fight because of how bad the wounds looked. I told him what happened and he didn't seem to believe me. Even though I had nothing to hide, my scars were misinterpreted and made me, in the eyes of another, a different person than who I really was. I've been thinking about this tonight, as I've been eyeing my scars for some reason. While I was looking at my scars, I realized that every single one of them tells a story. Some good, some bad, some funny, some sad. Either way, our scars are definitely a huge part of our being. No matter what, we are going to show our scars for the rest of our lives. We can hide them all we want so no one sees them, but when we strip away the layers of falsity they'll reappear. Our scars, in a sense, make us who we are.
Do I like scars? No. Am I glad I have them? Yes.
Without them, I wouldn't be "me".
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