Acceptance

I’ve written often about the car accident that left me with the gnarly scar and a missing part of my eyebrow that I don’t want to repeat every detail in this post. The short story is this: I was 16 when my aunt ran a red light and we crashed. I wasn’t wearing my seat belt and because of that I left part of my skin on the windshield. Four surgeries later, I look like I do now.

The first time I wrote about that experience was in my college paper to warn other young people about what could happen if they didn’t wear their seat belt. The other times I mainly focused on how the scar made me feel; how self conscious I felt for years and how being that self-conscious pushed me to be more extroverted and project a confidence I didn’t have. Having to wear a bandage on your face for part of your senior year can do that to a person.

For a long time after high school, I still felt like the first thing people would notice about me was the scar. I feared that some may think I had been part of a gang and treat me differently. It didn’t help that a couple of years ago while at a grocery store, a young cashier looked at me and exclaimed loudly, “Why did you do that to your face?!”

She was offended by my scar. It was a strange interaction that left us both with flaming red cheeks.

Then this past year something interesting happened. If you don’t know, I’m a big fan of the show Ted Lasso. It’s a wonderful show that is tender, funny and positive. One of the most beloved characters in the show is Roy Kent, a grumpy, foul-mouthed, but ultimately loving person. He always looks annoyed and has really thick eyebrows and wears black. So, for a Halloween contest at work, I was Roy Kent. My eyebrows were penciled in, as you’ll see below.

The interesting thing that happened was that when I looked closely at my eyebrows, I had this distinct feeling of, “that’s not me.” Not having that small gap on my left eyebrow felt unfamiliar. It felt foreign. It felt unlike me.

This was the first time that this happened, that I consciously accepted my scar as part of myself, and not something foreign. It makes sense. I’ve had it since I was 16 and I’m now 38. I’ve lived with it longer than I’ve lived without it. It took me over 20 years to finally accept it, but I’m glad I finally reached this point.

Your Turn

How about you? Is there some part of you that took you a long time to accept or come to terms with? Let me know in the comments or shoot me an email.

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