The World Needs Your Scars

I had but one favorite pastime when I was a little girl. At the very back of my childhood home there was a small, cement-floored room that we dubbed the "play kitchen." It had book shelves along two walls, but the rest of the space was occupied by my imaginary world. Dolls became my children, and let me tell you, I could dote with the best of 'em! I fed my babies, changed diapers and outfits, and boy did we have a lot of appointments to attend! I practiced my dream life day after day before I could even read. I imagine if I had told little Abigail that she would be living a very different life at almost 30 years old, she would have looked at me with wide eyes and said, "No! I want THIS!"

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It was only a month after I watched my dad take his last breath. I felt like a fragile tower of blocks propped up against a wall and just waiting for the slightest little breeze to topple me. At 19 years old, I was desperate to make connections in this new town where I found myself. At the same time, I felt like I was swimming in mud, moments away from suffocating. I decided to join a young adult church group on an excursion to the local Labor Day fireworks display. As I sat on the floor of the van, surrounded by strangers and listening to them prattle on about youtube videos and stupid things pet owners had trained their animals to do, my skin crawled and left me wishing I could crawl back into bed! 

I have always had an "old soul." I remember despising my place at the "kid table" from the time I was pretty young. But the trauma of watching my dad slowly wither away from a terrible cancer aged my soul on overdrive, I think. The world, once my oyster, now seemed a very dark and unsafe place. I went from giddily pursuing my dreams and the possibility of independent life in the big city to attending oncology appointments with my beloved hero. I struggled to relate to this group of my peers who seemed to be more concerned with what others thought of them than the fact that we were all slowly dying (morbid but true). 

I am in a different place now. I can be silly and appreciate the beauty of a sunset. I can engage in frivolous conversation and plan for the future. Cancer changed me, though. My eyes were opened to suffering and brokenness in a way I never desired but deeply needed. I developed a gut-churning empathy for others meeting the shadow side of this world. Do I wish within the deepest part of me that I could reclaim the innocence and dreams of that little girl in her "play kitchen"? Yes. As I look back on the last decade of my life, though, I am deeply humbled by this mark on my life. You may not be able to see the cancer-scar on my heart, but it has afforded me relationships and experiences that little girl would not have otherwise experienced in her future. I have held the hands of the suffering, smoothed the brow of the sick and dying, scooped up traumatized babies and soothed grown-up traumatized babies with nothing but my gaze and voice. 

Do you ever wish you could live a different life? Claim the skin of another? Maybe you, like me, bear scars you never dreamed of wearing. You may wish you could dig those scars out with a scalpel. But friend, hear me: The world needs your scars. This broken, beautiful world needs you and your marvelous story, wherever you are within the pages. Your brave, bold scar will remind someone else that she is not alone in the breaking, and it may be that message alone that revives her for another day. So today, my friend, let's show up for each other...scars and all.