PHYSICAL SCARS THAT TURNED TO EMOTIONAL SCARS

Souvenir that is given to people who have survived tragic or dramatic events changes their perception of life in different ways. My scars tell a story, they are a remainder of when life tried to break me but failed. They are markings of where the structure of my character was welded, from physical scars to emotional scars.

I was born in a humble family in a remote village in Kenya. I grew up a happy girl, joined school and life was so nice until I remember one time when I was in class 3, during breaktime as we were playing around, my friends noticed that the back my legs looked totally different. One of my legs was extremely black from behind compared to the other leg. I remember they laughed at me and reported to our class teacher that I didn’t take shower. The worst part was that, the teacher didn’t bother to look at my leg and all she did was to send me back home to take a bath. I was so embarrassed and ashamed; I just remember the day as if its yesterday.

When I went back home and narrated what had happened in school, my mother narrated a story to me on how I got in to a boiling milk when I was 1 year old, it might be funny when I mention milk but those days Africans measured wealth in terms of the number of cows and goats one owned, so we owned a number of cows and the milk was always available in large quantities. I had been living with black scars on my back of my body and one of my leg. That’s when it downed on me the reason why my mother insisted on me wearing long socks even when the whether was extremely hot and insisted that I shouldn’t remove them.

As days went by, I started withdrawing from my friends, shut myself away and focused on negativity from my friends. My performance went down and I started to hate school. In class four my mother transferred me to a different school and this time it was a boarding school. Rural boarding schools in Kenya are not so advanced so the students share washrooms. I remember the first day when I went to shower with the fellow students in the afternoon, they were all shocked! And they were all shouting, “look at her back”. I was so embarrassed and afraid to an extent that I didn’t take shower for a week and I hated school more. I was so depressed because all the students would come to ask me when am I going to take shower because they all wanted to see my scars at the back and witness what their friends said about me. After some days I started taking shower either after night preps when everyone was running to sleep or very early in the morning when everyone was asleep.

I had nobody to talk to I could even try and make my parents understand my situation but all was in vain. My class teacher tried to talk to me, because she could see that something was not alright with me, but she ended up concluding that I was an introvert because I could barely talk even in class. I was grounded to denial. I lived in fantasy and world of self-denial in my primary school life.

I had it in mind that in high school things would be different because at least highschoolers are somehow mature but things were really different. I joined a girl’s school but when they noticed on the scars on my back, they began spreading rumors that I tried to bleach my body and the chemicals that I used backfired on me, and I therefore lived with a health condition. At first, I tried to make them understand that those were just scars and anyone can have them but they said I was defending myself.

Sometimes I could sit down and think of a happy life if I could not be in that situation I was in. But when I used to remember that, that was something I was going to live with, I was so heart broken and all I could do was to withdrew from people, shut myself away, raged and lived with negative energy all through my childhood. I remember in form 3 we were learning how to describe characters in literature and the teacher asked a certain girl to describe me as an example and she confidently said, “she’s a beautiful girl with scary scars on her back making her look like a hyena.” I broke down in tears and hated myself more.

I lived feeling devalued by society, in school and lived with trauma. I developed feelings of shame, I was depressed for a long time, strain in social interactions, low self-esteem, embarrassed. As time went by I had to cope up so I decided to always put on a trouser. Until to date Its funny that I only wear trousers and long t-shirts that cover my back. I also don’t like participating in activities where my scars will show and make people ask discomforting questions. My physical scars led to my emotional scars.

I can confidently say that living with scar marks on my back has taught me a lot. It has changed my perception in life in different ways, for example; it has taught me knowledge of anxiety and fear that no book can give me. I am familiar with depression, being neglected because I have been there and I have lived with them, and if someone comes to me having lived with trauma, I am able to extent them through empathy because have been there and I can tell them genuinely that you can find it in yourself and you can go deep in your courage and face life again. Visible and invisibles scars (something that happened and hurts you) are a lingering reminder of what we’ve been through, and what we’ve become as a result. Life is filled with tragedies- the question is- do you get back up and get out or do you care?