Scars

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

I had just read this excerpt from the Velveteen Rabbit earlier this week, and then I heard it tonight in my friend's wedding. I take it in a slightly different manner than the pastor intended, but it is the same basic idea. To be "real" - whatever that means to you - hurts, but is worth it. Some times though, it doesn't feel like that. It feels like I am done feeling. Like I would rather have my eyes in my sockets, and ears that don't flop quite so much, and to live on a shelf, untouched, with my un-mussed fur and well tied bow. But that isn't reality, and that isn't how we want to be or live. Not usually.

Aren't we all the velveteen rabbit in one way or another? Don't we all have some good scars from being real, but also some bad ones?

My best friend just published her second book (HIGHLY recommend it: Magical Shrinking: Stumbling Through Bipolar Disorder, www.christianewells.com)and on her blog she posts about an experience of working with a girl who is a cutter and recognizing so many things in that moment, and connecting to how she herself was one years ago. She writes this line about what happened following a girl asking her if she was a cutter, noting the most visible scar, a vertical one that runs up her wrist:

"I said yes, and we sat in silence, looking at our scars."

I am too tired to really write, and too emotionally spent from a messed up day - full of my pettiness and over sensitivity, and elements of fiction blurring the truth, because both make me hurt and one rubs in the pain of the other - and now my head is full and I need to slow my thoughts or (preferably) put them in a drawer and try to rest.

I miss blogging, maybe getting it out, out into a space where I am pretty sure it is no longer read, but it is out there, some where, is helpful. It eases some of the loneliness, to think of common connections.

Oh that sounded dramatic.