Scars

I talk to myself a lot.

It's a weird part of being an introvert.  I make grandiloquent speeches that will never be delivered.  Sometimes I transcribe them, but mostly I just get myself fired up with how right I am to have my own opinion.  Not very helpful, but I impress myself.

When I get back from mission and try to reintegrate into my own culture, the country where I was born, the city that I chose to live in seven years ago, I feel a distance.  I've experienced things that are hard to explain, difficult to share, and utterly unlike anything that most people have seen, aside from news stories.  And there is only so far words can go in explaining bad things, especially on a succinct and pithy platform like nightly news, or the headline of a buzzfeed article.  So I think on a metaphor and launch a rambling speech in my lonely hotel room, here in Paris, perched between my life in the field, in Nigeria (this time), and the Western World, on my way to Bordeaux to meet with more MSF field staff like me.  I'm currently in a city of refugees and Westerners, privileged and destitute, far from my own home, as loosely defined as 'home' is.  And I think on mental health, and well being.

I think about scars.

In my my post about home, I was thinking on how disparate experiences give us disparate origins, since two children having grown up in the same town can reunite after decades, realizing that they no longer share a history.  Some experiences are experiences of culture, of norms and of rules.  But some experiences are about events, about something happening.  And this is less about where you are from, but more about what you have seen.

And which experiences leave a mark.

If I come back from Africa, eyes afire, and you greet me as a long-separated friend returning, with a happy exclamation and an invitation to coffee, as we settle into our seat across from each other and make small talk, and you get around to the questions, you ask me, "So how was it? What happened?" How do I answer?  I consider.

I've brought back a knife from Africa.  It is exotic, fantastic in its description.  Captivating, alien.  Powerful, dangerous, sexy.  You see complicated feelings in my eye as I talk about the knife.  I weave a vague and deflecting story.  You ask me more about the knife.  It intrigues you.

I have this knife, and it is interesting, but it is dangerous.  I hint of the scar I took when I met the knife.  I don't show you the scar, but you who know me can see that I don't use my left arm as dexterously as before.  Nine months ago, I was nimble and deft, but now there is a hitch.  You know the scar is there, on my left bicep.  Your eyes are drawn there as I weave obfuscating screens around the story.  You ask again about the knife.

I have it with me.  I carry it always, now.  I never let it go.  But I don't tell you this.  I don't show you the knife, and I don't show you the scar.  But you are canny, and you know of the scar, and you hear me talk of the knife, and see the expression in my eye.  It's powerful, and it's here.

You ask me to see the knife.  You are captivated, it is from a different place, a different time, a powerful artifact of a lifestyle that you will never lead, a culture you will never encounter.  You could never have the same experience as the scar that hinders my arm, but what an entrancing thing, to just be pricked by it?  Why not to have a full taste, to feel your flesh be parted by this horror, this artifact from quaint warfare, from divided societies thousands of kilometers away.  You ask to feel the bite of the knife.

How can I, in good conscience, prick you with this knife, that will leave a wound that your doctors cannot heal.  A wound that would leave a scar, even as diluted as the blade would be from the conversion from events--heart-pounding, vision-blackening, urine-inducing events-- to mere words, gestures, symbols, trying in vain to convey the chemicals pounding through your blood stream as your body dumps adrenaline, goes into fight or flight mode.  Despite not being the sword of first-hand experience, the knife of description still holds an edge.

I bring a knife back into your polite society.  I cannot in good conscience draw it.  And to ask me for the stories, to ask to feel the bite of this blade, is unfair.  I won't cut you with the stories of the things I have seen.  I will not mar your psyche with the dimpling of scars from this black blade.  I will instead seek others whose blades are similar to mine, whose scars are reminiscent of mine.  And we will all hide our knives together, obliquely referencing our scars.  Occasionally, we will show each other our knives or our scars, and we will bear the burden together.