My scars are my reminders of the battles I have lost....

.....But the wars that I have won.

I've heard the saying "Scars are tattoos with better stories" my entire life.  Mainly I think it was a ploy to steer me away from ever taking a magic needle marker to my skin for a permanent moment in my life.  Well...yea that didn't work.  I have a tattoo.  And I have scars. so many, many scars....

I have an abundance of emotional scars that manifested as physical ones in my younger youth.  Yea I was the emo girl who did the cutting thing for a minute.  Wasn't quite my style.  I do have some interesting patterns embedded into my flesh.  I think they're beautiful.  My body scars so upraised I have scars from toddler-hood that are just as pink and fresh as the day I got them.  My favorite scar is the one I got from playing cops and robbers with my cousin, Kyler and slid across lava rocks like a baseball player.  I remember the blood pouring into my socks and just being mesmerized by it.  Then after my brief moment of "holy shit" I started screaming my head off.

Then there's the scar on my back.  Got that one from a dog bite. Almost got the dog put down but it had it's rabies shot.  All I'm saying is that rabies shots did not sound appealing.   needles in stomach...yea no thanks.  One of my favorite scars is the one on the back side of my hip.  It's this beautiful, thin, perforated stream of solid red tissue.  I obtained this little beauty from crawling under a barbwire fence at Palo Duro School House.  The funny thing about that scar is I heard something rip, but my shirt didn't even have a hole in it.  I remember my very best friend looking at it saying over and over I was going to get tetanus.

Then there are the scars I cannot stand.  I have four "caterpillar" scars on my stomach from having galbladder surgery when I was 14.   They're hideous. They sting. They're just not so epic as many of my other ones.  Stupid little buggers....

Then here we go backtracking to the "scars are tattoos with better stories" nonsense.  I lucked out on that one.  I have a tattoo that SCARRED too =)  Win for me!  My tattoo is amazing.  It's even more amazing because of the scar that lines the letters =D  In the picture you can see the little line above my jeans that is my barbwire scar.

I used to loathe my scars.  I hated the little mountains of skin that made a road map across my body.  Then people always asked how I got them and were amazed at some of my stories.  I finally accepted that every imperfection that criss-crossed my body was beautiful.  If I didn't have my scars I wouldn't have nearly as wonderful stories as I do now.  These scars are forever reminders of the stupid things I did, the friends that did them with me, and the bystandards that were screaming for me to stop.

Embrace your outer beauty.  Accept every little imperfection that makes you cringe when you look in the mirror.  Just remember you're always going to be beautiful.


Peace, love, and jelly -rolls.

MissMeredith.