All Your Beautiful Scars

All the Beautiful Mistakes

Mattie Best

The backspace button is “the best thing to happen since sliced bread.” Quickly erase that one grammar error, and incorrect comma within a matter of seconds. Mistakes are almost obsolete: except for when you transfer back to reality.

 

            Here’s my problem, and here’s how you’re going to use this to fix yours. I live in a world where it’s constant mistake after mistake. I am a chain link fence, with my mistakes acting as the links all playing twister within each other and making me one hell of a walking mess. Some of my mistakes seem small to other people, but impact me in ways I can’t explain. We all have those small mistakes that shouldn’t affect us whatsoever, but do and it really is starting to get obnoxious, because it puts me in a funk and I get all weird. We all do, in our own ways. That’s the best part of being human, is that there are others who go through something similar and can relate.

            Regrets are something that, unfortunately, are inevitable, but for some reason so frowned upon. Sometimes we do things that seem worse than a silly mistake. Sometimes our regrets become another deep scar in our memories. Sometimes we do things that are so stupid, so pointless and immediately we beat ourselves up over and over again, cutting deep into that already piercing scar.

           Here’s the thing, when you see a veteran who maybe has no arm or a scarred face, do you judge him/her and get angry at him/her for having those scars? Of course not, you become of course sad, but proud and beam for the bravery of this soldier. You may not have fought in an actual war, but every day you take a breather, and you face yourself and what you’ve done, whether it seem big or small, is a battle in itself. You may not be getting shot at in a war across nations, but every mistake turns into a bullet piercing your very being. Mistakes eventually turn into regrets which become faded scars. Let’s take, for example, a few everyday scenario’s we’ve all faced. Late to work, traffic is horrible, and there is always that one guy who is standing on the side of the road with their “GOD BLESS” sign, asking for spare change to feed either their starving kids, dog, or alcohol addiction. We all have come to a point where we just look away. We avoid the eye contact, and the darts his eyes are shooting at us. We have all had the point where we’ve thought, “It’s his fault. My money wouldn’t be good for anything but a new bottle of Jack Daniels.” However, remember how whatever mistake it is that’s keeping you up the most in your warm bed haunts you? How do we know that his addiction or whatever it was that caused him to be without a home, begging on the side of the Intersection is haunting him too? Or what about that time we’ve felt a little down on ourselves and looked at that obese woman on the subway, and scoffed a little to ourselves as her obesity made us remind ourselves “It could be worse. I could look like that.” Who’s to say that the woman with severe obesity hasn’t already lost thirty pounds? Or is going through one of her hardest obstacles in her own war, and how she heals is by a Big Mac and a large Diet Coke? Who’s to say the man you avoided giving change to, because you refused to acknowledge his situation as not significant and not your problem, is taking his first step to recovery by getting out of the crack house he was just living in? When did it become our right to be the appointer of severity to other’s problems?

            One of the big things I hear when friends try and console other friends, is “Well at least you..” and then they continue to explain why the friend that needs consolations problems are inadequate to the other’s. If you want to stop living in your mistakes, and letting yourself become your mistakes, you must first acknowledge the importance of other people’s mistakes, and the level of importance of those mistakes to those people. You must realize that although it may make you feel better at the time, telling yourself “It could be worse” and that you’re “Happy you don’t look like that” is just about as affective as trying to clean all of the stains out of your carpet with Wine. Take not to how we don’t judge a war veteran based on the number of limbs he has remaining, and how we don’t think to ask how he got that way? Apply that to that obese woman on the subway, and think about if all the things she’s heard about her weight, weigh the looks, and the laughs, and apply those to her eating habits, it becomes one big cluster of scars. Just because you cannot see somebody’s scars, does not mean you need to forget the fact that they are there. In the beginning, I told you that one of the best things about humans is that they can relate to a certain aspect. That’s still true with the obese woman and homeless man. Just because they may have never done one of the things that makes you cringe, does not mean they have not done things that make them cringe. Until you can accept the fact that your problems are not at the top of the totem pole, you will be stuck in a trench of depression, false ego, and your mistakes. It is okay to not be okay, and it is okay to have a bad day and do stupid things. However, it is NEVER okay to think that your bad day is worse than somebody else’ because of whatever reason. It is NEVER okay to put somebody else’s problems below yours because you feel that your problems are more important. We never laugh at toddlers when they come crying to us with their new scrape, because they are little and they are learning. Why lose that standard for grown adults? Just because they are not completely small and helpless does not mean that they are incapable of learning. All we do, no matter who it is, is learn and grow. So stop belittling others growth and scrapes and scars because it seems small compared to your scrape and scars.

  Every day there is a battle of insecurities, mistakes, haunting past, and just life in general and every day YOU are there to fight it. When you go to bed, and everything is buzzing around you and your brain is spinning at 100000x a second, you’ve made it. You’ve survived your very own war, and every day with every mistake you’ll do it again.

It may not seem okay now, and it may be hard to see it in this point of view now, but as long as you’re willing to keep going, keep fighting, than one day you will come out on top. I’m not saying that these wars will stop, and I’m not saying it may be easier, because I know sometimes it isn’t; but with every dusk there is a dawn. With every nightfall, there is a sunrise.

This applies to everyone. To whoever reads this, if anyone reads this, this is for you. This is permission for you to let go.

You, whether you be a man or woman, are a soldier fighting daily in your own battles that may seem small to someone else who, also is fighting their own battles. You have made it this far, and that’s a hell of a lot better than what you think.

You are not what you’ve done. You are what you’ve become as a result of what you’ve done, and for that, I congratulate you.  I congratulate you on making your mistakes so that you learn from them, even if you’ve had to make them more than once. I congratulate you on battling a war every day of your life, and winning. I congratulate you on becoming scarred and bruised but still beating on, to your own drum.

You are not your past, so why continue to reflect on it?
Do not forget that you are a soldier fighting your battles every day, but so is that grumpy old neighbor, or co-worker who seems to have a never ending plethora of problems. A battle is a battle, and scars are still scars. All your beautiful scars.