Confession: It Wasn't The Cat
a personal essay on my relationship with my scars
Hiya!! This is a thinkpiece about my relationship with my scars and will be talking about self-harm, so please don’t read if you feel this will trigger you in any way! xx
I've talked to many people with different opinions of my scars. Friends who think me showing my scars is brave. I've had people call them my "battle scars." My parents, who would never tell me this directly, are ashamed. When people ask, I usually say they don't bother me. They're part of my body, the same way a stretch mark, freckles, or a birthmark are. But that's a big oversimplification of my genuine feelings and relationship to my scars.
Perhaps you could consider them a trophy. A hunter mounts the head of a deer on his wall, a monument to his power and conquest of the deer. I am powerful too, I can control my pain and conquer it. A survival mechanism against all instincts, to go against the innate animalistic need to avoid pain. A trapped person can saw off their own leg to break free; I mutilate my body in a controlled expression of pain. Perhaps you could consider my scars a means of reclaiming my body. In a world where my body is dissected, sexualised, and dissociated from myself beyond my control, is scarring my skin an act of defiance against misogynist beauty standards?
In all honesty, my scars are very validating to me. My specific brand of mental illness is an internal one. My self-destruction is quiet. It's me unravelling alone in my room, it's living in a cloud of depression. And because of that, it's been a constant struggle for me to communicate to professionals that my mental illnesses are real and difficult. That, combined with my childhood (on my Freudian bullshit) and public perception of mental illness created this terrible need for validation. My scars are a way for me to reassure myself that what goes on in my brain is real, it externalises my internal experience. As a 13 year old kid, dragged to the doctor by my mother after my teacher had called her and told her I was self-harming, I felt like my worst fear had come true. When my doctor asked me why I was self-harming, I parrotted off something I'd read on the internet, not knowing why I was doing what I was doing. "It's a way of turning an emotional pain into a physical one." I didn't know quite how real that narrative would become. Self-harm, specifically the scars, is a way for me to turn my mental landscape into a visible one.
For years my self-harm was "superficial" - "baby cuts," "cat scratches," call them what you want. I'd layer my arms, hips, and thighs in tiny cuts that would fade without a trace in time for summer. In many ways that worked, my self-harm could stay my little secret. But it made me feel inferior. Why couldn't I hurt myself to the same degree as other people? "Real" cutters had scars, I couldn't even self-harm properly. This is a really common experience. Malika, or @selfharmerproblems_ on instagram, a self-harm advocate, coined this as "babycut syndrome." (That's another essay for another day.) And when my self-harm reached the point of leaving scars, I felt this rush. Finally, it was serious. I wasn't just some emo teenage girl going through a phase. I was sick, finally people would believe I was sick. For years I'd seen people with lines of scars, now I had them too. I'd joined the league of real self-harmers with real problems.
Don't get me wrong, the same things I liked about my scars, I also hated. I hate getting stared at for simply existing. I hate strangers asking invasive questions as if me having visible scars is an invitation to ask about my entire mental health history. I hate how people see my scars before they see me. I hate how the majority of my family haven't seen me in short sleeves for years, and that I'm going to be the reason my little cousins learn what self-harm is. I hate how my mum always pressures me to put bio-oil on them to get them to fade. I don't want this to be misconstrued as some romanticisation of self-harm scars.
The scars are a lifeline. They stop me from relapsing. I see them and I can say "the pain was real, it happened. I don't need to damage myself further for people to see I'm hurting." Watching them fade over the last couple of years has been triggering. The less noticeable the scars are, the more I want to make more. Because if I don't have scars anymore, does that mean it never happened? As I physically and mentally heal, I wonder if it means that all those years in my depression haze fighting with my mind never really happened. If self-harm is a piece of my past, what was the point in it all? I have to try to change my mindset to celebrating that, to seeing the scars fading as a clean slate. To thinking of breaking free of this horrible addiction as a bright new future, not losing a part of myself. This is something I thought I’d keep to myself. Admitting that part of me likes my scars sounds like a very inappropriate opinion or feeling to have. For years I wondered if that made me an attention-seeker. I couldn’t be struggling if I liked it. I thought it made me a horrible person. But this is a very common experience for self-harmers, and isn’t talked about outside of those circles. But authentic conversations about mental health aren’t always palatable, and we do mental illness sufferers a disservice by crafting these conversations to what society is ready to hear. I feel this is something I need to talk about if I want to truly get better. I need to get past this block in recovery, and opening up about it is the first step. As I mentioned earlier on into this essay, I’ll be writing about self-harm in more detail in another essay.
All this is to say, my scars aren’t like an accidental scrape on the knee. I like to detach myself from them, say they’re just a physical mark on my body, but they’re much more than that. My scars are a part of my identity. I’ve never much cared for the “my scars tell my story” narrative. It’s always felt corny to me. That’s not to say it’s a bad way of thinking about self-harm scars. To each their own, everyone has their own unique way of thinking about their scars, and if that is comforting to them, then who am I to critique it? I’ve never seen my scars as a visual map of my struggles, in fact, most of them I don’t even remember why or when I did them. But I would be in denial if I were to say they’re like the chickenpox scar on my ribs or the freckles on my arms. These scars aren’t here by chance, they have an intrinsic story. An article I read that partially inspired this self-reflection has this beautiful passage that resonated with me: “The scars are part of my body, my skin, and are engrained in who I am, who I was and who I have become. The present, the past and the future are written on my body. I am who I am now, who I was yesterday and who I will be in the future, all written together, in the multiple scars that all have a presence, a past and a future. They are carved or burnt into my body in different situations and from different moods in the past, but they are all with me at the present and will be with me in the future. This is what the scars are all about: the past, the present, and the future.” (Gunnarsson, N. V. (2022). The scarred body: A personal reflection of self-injury scars.) I don’t think I could describe my feelings around my scars better than that. This same article goes on to write about how scars can become entwined with your identity. This is especially real for me, as I spent my formative teenage years self-harming, and have therefore taken it on as part of who I am. I don’t know who I am without self-harm and for a long time, I didn’t want to know that person. Self-harm was a part of me, as natural as eating or sleeping. While I work on breaking those thought patterns and defining myself outside of this behaviour, I still cling to that identity through my scars. “Without the cutting, I suddenly felt like I was nobody. The cutting made me whole, at least more whole– more unbroken. Eventually, the scars started to have a similar effect. The scars told me I was alive when I felt numb or dead inside. The scars told me I existed when I felt the opposite. The scars were something to hold on to when I wanted to let go. The scars gave me an identity when I felt like I had none…I felt seen and that I had something in me worth being curious about. I became somebody in others’ eyes and therefore, I also became somebody in my own eyes. The scars made me special when I felt far from special. The scars made me something more than who I was. It perhaps makes no sense, but the scars tell the story of myself. They connect my past selves with my present selves and redirects attention to my future selves. Without them, I am not the person that others or I see me as. I sometimes feel that I would be nothing without my scars.”
Over summer my mum asked me why I didn't care about my scars. At the time I told her that they were part of me. This is everything I didn't say to her, and I hope one day I can find a way to articulate all of this and help her understand.
If this was interesting to you in any way, I’d really recommend The scarred body: A personal reflection of self-injury scars by Nina Veetnisha Gunnarsson and An informational and Personal essay on the motivations behind selfharm by Joseph The Dreamer.