Everyone has at least one scar. No? You’ve somehow miraculously lived an injury-free life? Newsflash! Your belly button is technically a scar, so there’s that little factette. Indeed, birth itself scars us for life on Day 1. There are people who receive many, many more scars throughout their lives; their umbilical cord getting severed in the delivery room is just the first one.

Some scars are small, like what you might get from nicking a finger with a sharp kitchen knife just after you sharpened it (coincidentally only a moment after you cautioned yourself not to cut your finger!), but the cut didn’t require any medical attention – only a band aid or maybe some duct tape. Other scars indicate that professional emergency medical attention was needed, and sutures or staples or surgical super glue were definitely required.

Oftentimes, the scars we accumulate are our own damn fault obtained from our foolish or occasionally reckless decisions. We can look back at these scars and maybe laugh a little bit because we knew better but engaged in idiotic behavior anyway. But sometimes a scar comes from an unexpected event that is completely out of our control and are no laughing matter whatsoever.

Some scars tell a story of great, almost unbelievable suffering and pain, resilience, and survival.

It’s easy to tell the minor scars from the major scars from a visual standpoint, however, it’s all but impossible to gauge the mental impact of any one of them. There’s no doubt that some of them required subsequent therapy. And maybe some strong pharmaceutical medication for a little while.

Everyone remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing then they got their scar as if it happened today.

When you look at your scars, you relive the events that precipitated the injury over and over. Some of the circumstances of the injury can be slightly humorous while others are far more serious or even disturbing in nature. Or sometimes the situation was just extremely reckless and you’re lucky that you survived. You remember those all too well.

I look in the mirror and see the scar on my chin that I got when I was about 7 years old. I got that one from wearing my dad’s old cowboy boots up the cinder block steps to the aluminum skinned Airstream trailer, catching a toe in one of the cinder block holes and tripping forward onto the shiny metal threshold. I couldn’t believe how much blood was coming out of my chin and it freaked my mom out a little bit. Four sutures later, and I was good as new. Summer of 1968, Zamora, CA.

There’s a scar on my right check from when I was about 9. I was playing kick the can with the kids in the neighborhood and while running full speed toward the can, I ran into the sharp end of a freshly pruned oleander hedge as I was trying to run through it. 1971, Sacramento, CA. A couple of inches higher and it would have been my eye.

There are the scars that tell the stories of our careless youth, for example, the scars on our knees and elbows from skateboarding. Mine are from approximately 1970 to 1982. The DNA from my skin is all over the streets and sidewalks of North Hollywood.

There’s a scar on my left temple from when I got pistol whipped when I was 21. The short version is that this is a cautionary tale of youthful hubris going wrong and making the mistake of letting a belligerent friend – who will remain anonymous – with nunchucks under his car seat (which, by the way, is highly illegal in California) engage with a drunk person with a revolver in his back pocket who turned out to be extremely dangerous.  Summer of 1982, in the parking lot of the Star Lite Room / Henry’s Tacos at the corner of Tujunga Avenue and Moorpark Street, North Hollywood, CA. It took dozens of sutures to close up the two lacerations. I was slightly concussed and had a ringing headache for three days.

There are scars that tell a story of a life changing traumatic event like from a major surgery or from putting a person’s body back together after a godawful car accident, or from a fire, or from being in combat. I have a scar on the inside of my right forearm from a skin graft for a 3^rd degree burn that was received after getting electrocuted with 277 volts. It was a near-death experience and seeing the white light was a life changing event. That happened on Monday, December 26, 1994, at the DIC Entertainment building, Burbank, CA. It took me seven months to recover from that accident. This only reinforced my disdain for Monday’s.

Decades after an injury, the scar will always remind us of the time and the place and the physical pain we endured when we think about them even though they have been long healed. Painful events always stick with you like that.

Granted, not all scars are physical; we all carry an unseen scar or two. These are the scars that run much deeper than human flesh and bone and go directly to our soul and are often more painful than their physical counterpart. We all have these. Life requires this of us.

Ultimately, our scars tell the authentic stories of our lives.

We should embrace them.

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