Hello all! I’ve wanted to write this since I read a very beautifully written post by Miss Li-Anne and meeting some new friends rekindled that need to write this.
So most of you know that I was in a car wreck last year. I hit my one year anniversary of that wreck, among other things, last month. How did I total my truck you ask? Well, like most of time in my life, I was running late. I had just come back home and I had forgotten to wrap my Christmas presents for my friends at school. It was cold outside but there weren’t any flakes on the ground so I thought I was going to be ok. I spent maybe an half an hour wrapping the gifts before I went outside to put all my things back in my truck. Snow, which I have labeled the ‘White Death’ at times, had covered everything. I had never in my entire life driven in snow. East Texas doesn’t get that much snow to begin with but this year it almost a blizzard. I took a breath and quickly packed my truck. It was full to the brim with laundry, bedding, the Christmas presents, and many, many more things. I had just enough room to turn the wheel and shift gears easily. I started the truck and made my way to the road. I barely started down it before I started slipping. I pulled over and put it four-wheel-drive and started again. Much easier this time so I felt better about it. I noticed that I needed gas so I started towards town. Down the road I live on there is this hill. Towards bottom of it is a bridge. Somehow, someway, I hit patch of black ice and I crashed into this bridge going around 40 some odd miles. Thankfully, and I do think this was the key to my survival, my laundry took most of the blow. But I when I hit the bridge the air bag went off. I was thrown forward, then back, and then forward again. This time my seatbelt had snapped and my head hit the cracked windshield. From the middle of my head there was a zigzag and sort of loop to the right side cut. I would learn later from the EMT that I was almost scalped but thankfully that wasn’t the case.
I knew that I had wrecked and several thoughts came to me at once:
1) Oh *%$&
2) Man after all that work on my truck and now it’s totaled. (I had just installed new brakes. Fat lot of good it did right?)
3) Oh God my mother is going to freak
4)Oooooooooow
5) Am I bleeding?
6) Can I still move my fingers, toes, neck?
7) Where is my phone? I need help
I stepped out of the truck because I knew I wasn’t going to find help just lying there. Plus I needed to know if I could still walk and with that I found my answer. However, being in a wreck can really mess with your equilibrium so after one step out I fall on my ass. I hear someone calling out to me. At first I was thinking “Light at the end of the tunnel?” but no it was a nurse who happened to be visiting a patient nearby. She had seen my wreck and had already called 911. She rushed over and applied pressure to my head and began the standard questions one would ask someone if they had a concussion. What is your name? Can you move everything? What hurts? Who is president? etc. More thoughts began to race into my head.
How was I going to inform my friends, whom I consider family, about this?
What about Nathan?
NATHAN!
The first guy I start a relationship with (we had just made it official eight hours prior to the wreck) and I wreck.
I am not going to die here in some ditch, like Mom had always had nightmares about, after all of that. Damn it I am going to survive from this. *@&$ you, Death, it is not my time.
At first I made jokes about my scar. Like I’m a boy and I lived so I must be Harry Potter. Or that I was a mad scientists experiment and so on. But I was really insecure about it. I didn’t feel disfigured or anything but I felt…not broken but ashamed, that the scar had to be hidden. I felt as if a part of my head was missing because I couldn’t feel it for the longest time and it’s only until recently that I’ve been able to. And I don’t know why but I just felt self-conscious about. I grew my hair out and I always kept it covered. Then I was going through Veronica Varlow’s Danger Dame Diary one day and I remember how she was mauled by a dog and how she overcame that. Clarity finally set in and I realized that I was still me, scar or no scar. Not only that but I was still beautiful. Nothing had changed. And then I realized something important. My scar was not a disfigurement or something to be insecure of. I had a mark of survival on me. I had clear visible representation that I was a fighter and that was something to take pride in.
Scars are beautiful. They show how strong you are and that you’re not going to let something like a car wreck, cancer, or a pissed off Rottweiler stop you from doing what you want to do. I have several of them and I am proud of each and every one as should the rest of you. You are all beautiful inside and out and nothing is going to change that.
Wear your marks with pride my friends.
Always with love and icing kisses,
Jay Scarlet
