Secret Scars
I learned a new word the other day. When I came across it and realized that I’d never seen it before, I immediately consulted my online dictionary for enlightenment. There it was: cicatrix.
Here’s what it means: new tissue that forms over a wound and later turns into a scar. In botanical terms, it refers to the scar left by a fallen leaf.
The botanical reference helps me visualize the word’s meaning. I picture the flexible green stem of some living plant stretching luxuriously toward the sun. About halfway up, I see a small white line or crescent marring the stem’s smooth finish. It’s the scar of a leaf that once grew from that stem but has dropped to the ground, leaving nothing but a faint sign to mark its passing.
I read that definition, and I wondered: how many of us are walking around with such nearly invisible scars, too?
The answer is probably all of us.
Almost from the day we’re born, we begin the process of accumulating scars. Some of them are purely physical, acquired through an accident which involved some piercing of the skin. I have such a scar on my forefinger, a souvenir of the time a sharp knife proved too much for my four-year-old hand. To this day, there is a tiny mark and a miniscule amount of swelling in the place where knife penetrated finger and my young blood was spilled.
More often, the scars we carry are psychic ones and the spilled blood is merely figurative. Or maybe “merely” is not the correct word, since we all know that the kind of things that leave emotional scars can be far more painful than physical mishaps, and even more difficult to heal.
Have you ever felt betrayed? Abandoned? Did someone you trust prove false? If you’ve had such an experience, you’re probably walking around with an invisible scar where once the solid, unblemished tissue of trust lived. Wherever you go, and however many people in your life have proved themselves to be loyal and true, there will always be a tiny part of you that doesn’t quite trust that it will last. Once you’ve experienced that kind of betrayal, you know firsthand that it exists. And knowledge of that existence haunts you, to a smaller or larger degree, for the rest of your life.
The abandonment may appear trivial to the outsider, as when a kindergartner meanly decides to switch best friends in the middle of the school year. An observer may be forgiven for dismissing the rejected child’s pain as a fleeting thing, a playground tragedy quickly forgotten. To the child, however, the betrayal by someone she believed to be steadfast doesn’t feel trivial at all. It feels like her whole world has turned upside-down. It feels like maybe she’s not loveable enough, or deserving enough, to hold onto a friend. The pain, when she first experiences it, feels anything but fleeting.
She may, in fact, bury the pain so deep that she actually “forgets” all about it. But the scar of that early friendship so cruelly ripped away from its stem remains in her psyche, like the mark left behind when a once-living leaf drops to the ground and perishes.
A Compendium of Loss
The deepest scar, of course, comes from losing someone we love. There are other, less traumatic, physical losses, the kind that involve people moving away or simply moving on. There can be losses even inside an ongoing relationship. That’s because any change involves the loss of what was before.
The wise couple will be on constant alert to notice when one stage of their marriage has ended, and a new one begun. The change can be subtle, or it can be dramatic. Either way, it must be dealt with. Sometimes new tools are called for. New ways of communicating, of understanding one another, of healing. To ignore the inevitable march of the seasons is to live in stagnation.
The same applies to raising children. Almost before we’ve grown used to one stage of their growth, the next one crowds in to replace it. It can be disconcerting to see our adorable toddler turn into a buck-toothed schoolchild, or our amenable youngster transformed into a sulky teen. One stage may be more beloved by us than another, but we don’t get a choice: we must adapt. We have to cope.
Changing jobs, moving out of a much-loved neighborhood, going back to the city at summer’s end: our lives are filled with losses, and the nearly invisible scars that mark the place where something living and vibrant once lived. Everything that we are today is a composite of all the experiences we’ve had, along with the residual signs of their passing. And everyone we meet is a similar composite, highly personal and mostly hidden from view. There’s no use walking around nursing the scars of our losses. We need to acknowledge what we’ve put behind us and rise with aplomb to greet what we have in front of us.
This, however, is more easily said than done. There’s a certain emotional inertia that can hold us back from that confident forward stride. It can keep us brooding over the scars of our losses. The distrust of old betrayals may linger. The pain of missing what we no longer have can be paralyzing. We mourn our youth. We mourn the loss of our illusions. We grieve for dreams gone up in smoke.
Around us, our family and friends may be clueless. They have no idea why we’re stuck in a certain area. That’s because they can’t see the almost invisible cicatrix that’s been formed like scar tissue over our hearts.
A Universal Truth
All of which leads to one inevitable conclusion: the human condition involves loss on practically a constant basis. No stage of life lasts as long as we may want it to. Many once lively relationships peter out. When one stage passes gracefully into the next, the mark it leaves behind is minimal. But when there is anguish or strain involved, the scars can be deep.
Most of the time, we let those once-vibrant leaves drop to the ground with a sigh of regret and then move on. Sometimes, though, we find that harder to do. Sometimes the pain of loss just won’t go away. That’s when we need the help of friends or perhaps professionals to ease us forward.
The important thing is to remember that every single person on the face of this planet is walking around with plenty of invisible or nearly invisible cicatrix on the stems of their lives. None of us know the kind of scars that other people are carrying around, and most of them don’t know ours. Sometimes we aren’t even fully acquainted with our own!
This should make for a more compassionate attitude toward even those who irritate us or arouse our antipathy. We may not know what sort of losses they’ve sustained, but we can be certain that they’ve sustained some. We have that in common, because we’re human. Because we’re alive.
And we know it because being alive means constantly dropping leaves and collecting scars, even as we’re stretching and growing toward the sky.
