I'm a Survivor

The freckles on your body signify damage to the skin.  Your heart breaking and attemping to heal itself signifies emotional damage.  Scars on the skin.  Repairs within the body from a broken bone.  However these scars manifest, it shows hurt and trauma.  But these scars tell a story.  A story that bring character to the person who beholds it.  I think there is something beautiful about scars.  It means triumph.  It means that the hurt is over, the wound is healed, done with.  It is a mark of strength - both inner and outer.   Survivors.

My scars span decades and tell several stories.  I am not ashamed of any of my scars.  I'm very much proud of them and what each mark has told me.  Now, if you've read my blog in the past, you'll know the inner scars... so I won't bore you with those.  Here, I'm going to tell you the stories of my visible scars.  The ones that people most ask me about and some that people don't even notice. 

I have a half-dollar sized scar on my knee with a thin faint scar leading away from it for about two inches.  It almost looks like a balloon.  This is the biggest one on my body.  And it has scarred me the most, emotionally and physically.  I remember the day when I got this.  I was crabbing with my grandparents/family on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (or some other small bridge near it).  I went venturing out, as I always did, with my sister because it was hot and we were bored.  On the way back, I ended up racing my sister, tripping on a raised board and falling.  What I fell onto was a nail that was sticking out of the bridge.  It dug a deep hole into my knee and, subsequently, the length of my sliding.  I didn't notice it until I got back to where my grandparents were and they flipped when they saw the amount of blood.  And when I looked down, my face must have turned white because my dad grabbed me and carried me to the car.  I was taken to the emergency room where they washed it, sterlized it and wrapped it up.  For some reason they didn't, or couldn't, give me stitches.  I ended up having to wear a soft cast on it so that I wouldn't bend my knee and reopen the would over and over again.  It was the worst, most itchy, few months I've ever experienced. 

The next scar is on the same leg - about 3 inches about it.  When I was in middle school I tried so hard to fit in.  My best friend was one of the popular girls and, through that, I was in that crowd, too (though I'm not sure I really belonged).  I did things I shouldn't have done only to fit in with them.  Why?  B was the ring leader and she was my best friend. I didn't need to impress anyone else.  But I did anyway.  Call it teen angst.  Call it peer pressure.  But I went with the crowd.  On Fridays we had free choice during P.E.  My group of friends would usually just hang out on the floors around the gym writing messages in pen on each other's bodies.  Most of the other kids would play basketball.  I can remember it like it was yesterday.  I was so smitten with this guy, S, and he asked if he could write something on my leg.  Naturally, I gave in.  As he was in the middle of writing something, a basketball came our way and literally drilled the pen into my leg.  I mean literally.  The basketball landed right on top of the pen and started spinning. It was so surreal.  It drilled into my leg like a warm knife digging into butter.  We all stood there in shock.  I had no idea what to do.  No one did.  We didn't want to tell the teacher because we had gotten in trouble for bringing pens to P.E. before.  So, like what any middle schooler  would do, I took the pen out of the skin and lets the blood start gushing out....  and by gushing I mean GUSHING.  I ran to the nurse, dripping blood throughout the hallways and my dad had to come get me.  Now, I don't know if he didn't take me to get stitched because he wanted me to learn a lesson from this or because he didn't think it was bad, but I went home and had to take care of the wound myself.  I used butterfly bandaids to keep the wound closed and exaggerated the wound at school for weeks to come.  It took a while for it to close but it eventually did.  The memory of that day will stay with me forever.  It's like it happened yesterday. 

I have three scars on my face that I CHOSE to have.  My family members all have beauty marks on our faces.  It's a mark of being apart of the Kim side of the family.  I used to have three... one under my eye, one on my chin and one under my bottom lip.  But like many Asian cultures, the Koreans believe that the placement of these marks signify certain things and were either lucky or unlucky.  I was told by my family that:

• The one under my eye was like a tear... that I would be faced with lots of sadness; a lot of crying in my lifetime.  I couldn't have that now could I?  So I decided I wanted that one removed.
• The beauty mark (yes, they call it a beauty mark) around my mouth was indicitive of, well, beauty.  It is a symbol of desire, passion and eroticness (is this a word?).  However, at the same time, it also symbolized unfaithfulness. People with moles near their mouths used to get teased with variations on the saying “바람기 있다,” which is basically a way to call someone a flirt in Korean.  Uhhh, what now?  Come again?
• The one on my chin didn't really mean much.  Some say that it means that you love traveling and adventure; which would mean that you might not stay in one place for long periods of time.  It could also mean a lucky life.  I dunno.  But I figured if I was getting rid of the other two, I might as well get rid of this one.

Somehow I managed to get my health insurance to cover these removals as "precautionary measure" for skin cancer.  I went through a plastic surgeon for this as my mom would NOT allow my face to be scarred.  However, since I am Asian, I had a higher chance of keloiding... and keloiding I did.  But only under the lip.  It's a good thing that my bottom lip is succulent because it hides the scar.  The other two you can barely see unless you are upclose... and even then you get distracted by my super cute freckles. 

So there you have it.  My scars.  My beautiful scars.  I have several more, like the one that I got from chicken pox and the one from falling off my scooter, but everyone has those.  These scars are unique.  No one else has these scars or these stories.  And that's what makes them cool and beautiful.  I survived a fall on a bridge, a stabbing and evil Korean beliefs.  Who else can say they overcame those?  I'm a survivor.