This week’s scars won’t be my first.
I’m not talking about the scars life leaves on your heart. I’m talking about scars I’ve made on myself.
I’ve lived with most of my scars for over 25 years.
The first time I cut they were just little scratches really. If I hold my arm in the right light you can just make out the little white lines.
The first time I cut myself deeply, if you asked 15 year old me what the trigger was, I’d tell you it’s because I’d broken my best friends favourite mug.
But the truth was a mountain of events that my teenage self didn’t have the skills to deal with.
I’d bandaged myself up and kept it hidden from the world with a silk scarf I told everyone was a fashion statement.
I did that with the memories to. Bound them up, tucked them away and pretended they’d happened to a different person, someone who wasn’t me.
Once my kids arrived and they became aware mummy had marks on her arms that other people didn’t I told them I’d been burnt from the oven and that’s why you had to be careful when near the oven.
But as they got older and began to understand the world a little more I told them the truth.
I told them how I hadn’t much liked myself as a teen, how events had made life difficult for me to feel like I fitted in and that I didn’t feel I had someone I could talk to, like I hoped they both had in me.
And at last I started to remove the bindings that had kept it all hidden away inside.
I’d always carried my scars as a reminder that no matter how tough life got I would always bounce back. I was a lot stronger than people knew.
I ignore all of this on Wednesday. I forgot this strength, I pretended that, how in the past I had soldiered on ment nothing, and only my actions here and now would help. And that I needed to release the darkness that’s been held for all these year.
And now I’m scared that the hospital have done such a good job at patching me up that these new scars won’t be loud enough.
Enough to stop me doing anything again for another 25 years.
But I hope instead theyre enough to help me find my strength again and encourage me to find the help so I never need to do this again.