SALON

Wednesday, Apr 11, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

Look at my scars

The remnants of my own illness have taught me that when it comes to difference, don't stare -- but don't turn away

By

Topics: Cancer, Psychology, Medicine,

Look at my scars (Credit: Natalia Klenova via Shutterstock)

“Do I freak you out?” she had asked.

It was the kind of question adults rarely pose. But Abigail (a pseudonym, like some other names in this piece) is 8, and she doesn’t have any qualms about being direct. The person she was asking, my daughter Beatrice, likewise didn’t hesitate in her reply.

Abigail is new to our school this year. She is in every way a typical second-grader, except that she was born without a left hand. It’s a trait that makes her undeniably noticeable, and so, sometimes, people ask questions. Sometimes Abigail has questions of her own. Sometimes, when you’re different, you want to know.

When Bea told me what Abigail had inquired about a few weeks ago, I’d winced a little, wondering how my child had answered. Had she passed whatever test Abigail was giving? I know how frank Bea can be, how she walks behind me when we’re out in public, checking whether the shiny, taut expanse of bare skin on my scalp is visible. “Mom, your bald spot,” she’ll say when we’re in a restaurant, fussing with locks to try to hide the five-centimeter circle where, a year and a half ago, I had surgery to remove cancer.

I know that Abigail’s question haunts many of us who are physically different, in ways both small and large, either by birth or circumstance. It plagues my friend with accident scars on his legs, who’s already nervous about summertime and exposing his flesh at the beach this year. Maybe it’s a small yet indelible birthmark on the chin. Or it’s a big burn. Or a missing limb. Does this make you want to look, or want to look away? Do we make you uncomfortable? Do we freak you out?

“It’s a thing that has to get explained,” says Natalie, a New York executive who’s had three serious melanoma surgeries and lives with ongoing psoriasis lesions. “For me, the anticipation of that is hard. I think people want to distance themselves from someone who’s had a traumatic event. Somehow you wind up having to reassure them that you’re not contagious, that they’ll be OK.”

Though she tries to be “very open about my illness, because I want people to get it,” Natalie admits she has nevertheless “some really upset moments” of unasked for attention. “I once had someone literally cross the road to ask what was wrong with my legs,” she says. “I was feeling really proud of myself for being brave enough to wear the skirt. And this woman came along and destroyed it.” She adds, however, “I don’t feel sorry for myself, and I don’t wear this as a badge. I just want to be looked at as the successful, independent woman I am — but I understand that some people can’t do it.”

It’s true that some people can’t, and there’s loss in there. I used to have a friend who liked taking pictures of his buddies, including me – right up until my diagnosis and my relatively minor disfigurement. Then he never took another photograph of me again. I wonder if I freaked him out.

My friend Frank, a West Coast entrepreneur, understands. A few years ago, Frank had radical surgery for bladder cancer that left him with what he calls a “Guinness Book of World Records scar” that starts at his sternum, loops around, and ends at his pubic bone. He also has a partial hernia that leaves him, in his word, “lumpy” under a shirt.

“I get a lot of people staring. I’m used to it,” he says. “It usually doesn’t bother me. I’m just a little self-conscious when people are peeking out the corner of their eyes in the locker room.” And, he recalls, “one time my wife and I were at Caesar’s Palace lying out in the super-bright, crystal-clear Vegas sun, and this woman next to us asked, ‘What happened to your stomach?’ She was pretty horrified when I told her.”

He’s still sometimes horrified himself. “I look at myself every morning, and I think of all the horrible shit that I’ve been through because of this disease,” he tells me. But when he looks in the mirror, he also sees a mark of survival. “I’m working out and riding my bike to train, and if that doesn’t tell you how I’m doing, go ahead and ask me. I don’t think I look that bizarre. I think I look like a guy who’s had major abdominal surgery.”

As Frank knows, when you’ve been through something life-altering, the first person you have to get to accept your look is yourself. “The first time I saw myself afterward, I thought, That looks very interesting,” says Johan Otter. Johan is a master of understatement. Seven years ago, Johan was hiking with his daughter in Glacier National Park when he was mauled by a grizzly bear. His scalp was torn off; his eye was clawed. He had to wear a halo brace for 12 weeks and go through multiple grafts and surgeries to recover. And then, he says, he had to learn to “push through” his first time out in public again.

“You get used to it,” he says. Besides, he jokes, “I never have a bad hair day.” Otter admits he can still be somewhat surprising to strangers. “Once at Costco this woman said, ‘Oh my God, what happened to your head?’” he recalls. But though he admits, “I’m a vain person just like anybody else,” Otter says that “I’m always extremely proud of my scars. When you go through something like this, people see you with your true self. You learn that what matters is what’s inside.”

It’s not always easy in our perfection-driven culture — where a weight gain of five pounds can be treated as a life crisis and toothpaste brands wage war on dingy teeth and a “puffy face” means you’re no longer considered “pretty” – to believe that within battle scars and what others would call abnormalities, there is a raging, painful exquisiteness. It’s often hard to feel the sideways glances and puzzled stares. But it’s harder still to be overlooked entirely, to feel like the remnants of the trials we’ve endured are the things that make others unable to look at us. We want to be looked at not with pity, not with fear, not with morbid curiosity. Simply with clear and open eyes.

So when Bea told me her friend Abigail wanted to know if she was freaking her out, I hoped Bea had answered honestly. More than that, I hoped she answered kindly. I hoped she didn’t pretend she’d never noticed Abigail’s missing hand, or changed the subject altogether. “What did you say?” I asked her nervously. “I told her no,” she shrugged. “I said, ‘Why would I be freaked? I love you.’” And then I exhaled.

I know life for Abigail – and Natalie and Johan and Frank and everybody else wounded or scarred or born different — is more complicated than that. The things that make us stand out in the crowd define us in a million little ways. They can remind us of the most dramatic, heroic moments of our lives, and of every small indignity and cruelty that has happened since. But what Bea and Abigail got to in the span of one recess period was that life isn’t about seeing past each other’s imperfections. It’s about being unafraid to look at them directly. Because that’s where the love is — in the cracks and the sufferings and the challenges. Life isn’t flawless. But it can be very, very beautiful. That day at recess, Bea told me, she had kissed Abigail, right on the place where her arm stops at the wrist. And they played together until the bell rang, and it was time to go back to class.

Mary Elizabeth Williams

Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • A missing poster hangs on a tree outside the Cleveland home of Amanda Berry Wednesday. Berry and two other women, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, made a daring escape this week after being held captive for more than a decade.
    Credit: AP/Tony Dejak

  • Elvis Rafael Rodriguez and Emir Yasser Yeje offer their best impression of  Eric B. & Rakim. On Thursday, New York prosecutors identified the pair as members of an international gang that robbed $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking into a database of prepaid debit cards and draining ATM machines around the world.
    Credit: AP

  • New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie walks to a podium during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Technology Enhanced Accelerated Learning Center at Essex County Newark Tech in Newark, N.J., Tuesday. Christie made less flattering headlines this week after undergoing a secret stomach surgery to curb his weight.
    Credit: AP/Julio Cortez

  • Workers stand outside the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday after a fire broke out in its 11-story building. Eight people were killed in the blaze.
    Credit: AP/Ismail Ferdous

  • Workers rescue a woman trapped for 17 days in the rubble of a garment factory building in Saver, Bangladesh, Friday. The building's collapse was the worst industrial disaster in the country's history, killing more than 1,000 people.
    Credit: AP

  • Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford gives his victory speech Tuesday in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., after winning back his old congressional seat in the state's first district.
    Credit: AP/Rainier Ehrhardt

  • Jodi Arias reacts in Maricopa Country Superior Court Wednesday after being found guilty of first-degree murder in the gruesome killing of her one-time boyfriend, Travis Alexander. Arias has subsequently said she wants the death penalty, claiming she'd "prefer to die sooner than later."
    Credit: AP/The Arizona Republic/Rob Schumacher

  • Ariel Castro stands for his mug shot Thursday at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, where he is being held on $8 million bail. The former bus driver is accused of imprisoning three young women and beating them repeatedly over a period of 10 years.
    Credit: AP/Cuyahoga County

  • Charles Ramsey addresses the media Monday after helping rescue three women held captive in Cleveland for more than a decade. Ramsey's hero portraiture has been complicated by revelations of his own domestic violence record.
    Credit: AP/The Plain Dealer/Scott Shaw

  • Michael B. Donley, Secretary of the Air Force, testifies during a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday. The military branch was rocked this week after its chief sexual assault prevention officer was charged with sexual battery.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 20 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations