The scars
I remember Wallace Stegner speaking to Terri Gross about staying with a woman who was abusive to him because it gave him material with which to write; something about that conversation struck me the wrong way and I quit reading Stegner. I think at the time I was struggling to become a writer myself and I thought honestly that my family and life had provided so much MATERIAL that I was struggling to escape and write fiction, like real fiction, and it turned me off much in the same way that a lot of first-person narration did during those times.
Later, I fell in love with a man who wanted scars, he actively picked me to blow up his life so that he could have scars. I didn’t want scars, but I wound up getting them anyway because I was too tuned out of my own center to know who or what I was or wanted. Flash forward to a few days ago, I was speaking to my friend, sitting on the front ledge of the LaLa trying to capture some of the warmth from the sun-baked bricks and talking about how fucked up her life is now because her daughter died. And I told her, it’s even more complicated than that, because her daughter was sick from the get go so there is really nothing to really wrap your mind around. The walking wounded is how she described herself. Look around I told her, everyone has a wound or two.
I was reading a book review today that quotes an analyst who said, “Life leaves its scars on all of us.” Indeed, but in those places where we are scarred, we are tougher than the average bear. No bullet, knife or other weapon of mass destruction like love and loss could penetrate the scar tissue again. No one who truly lives gets by unscathed.