Day 298 (Two, -Hundred & Ninety-Eight) of 365 days
Often we look at scars as a blemish. We think of them as something to hide, to cover up. Are they not a symbol of experience? Are they not the very things that make us who we are? In my life, I have learned that we need to remember the scars, whether emotional or physical, for through the suffering we find the happiness of being healed.
Whenever I try to reflect on how my life has been going, tears never fail to fall from my eyes. From my perspective: life is not at its best state for the past months. Life has not been good to me. Life shows its unpleasant side all at once. Everything fell apart, including the people I love(d), the things I enjoy, and ME. But what I realized— life needs to hurt me at times in order to let me grow and accept that not all things should come perfectly as planned. It is not going to be what you thought it would be. It will destroy, break and scar you first. And if you are strong enough, you shall overcome.
Beauty is a concept I struggle with—what it means, why it matters. I struggle because huge chunks of my life have not been beautiful. They have been ugly, marred by trauma, with pain, and anger. We think of beauty and often visualize glossy magazine pages and wafer thin models. We see beauty as superficial—eye color, hair texture, and numbers on a scale. We see beauty as something to be measured and weighed. I don’t see beauty that way. I see beauty as the grace point between what hurts and what heals, between the shadow of tragedy and the light of joy. I find beauty in my scars.
We all have scars, inside and out. We have freckles from sun exposure, emotional trigger points, broken bones, and broken hearts. However our scars manifest, we need not feel ashamed but beautiful. It is beautiful to have lived, really lived, and to have the marks to prove it. It’s not a competition—as in “My scar is better than your scar”—but it’s a testament of our inner strength.
Take a moment now to smile. Do you feel it in your muscles? In your skin? In your toes? Where do you feel happiness? When bad things happen, we don’t instinctively feel happy and beautiful, but we don’t need to despair because life gets ugly sometimes. Joy and beauty are everywhere, in everything, in every one of us—no matter how we look, and no matter how we may hurt temporarily.
Grace is beauty in motion and we can create it by choosing to smile—to recognize that we’re strong, despite our insecurities, and the world is an amazing place, despite its tragedies. We may hurt, but we will heal—and there’s beauty in our scars.
