What Do Your Scars Mean?

It was 2013, I was in my happy place, a Pearl Jam concert. This show was at the Barclays center in Brooklyn. The second night of back to back shows. I was happy. Right before “Betterman,” Eddie Vedder started to talk. What he said that night struck cord in me, and I’ve remembered it to this day.

He said: “You know, a lot of us maybe have something in common. I know that the thing that bonds my friends and us together is usually the fact that at some point we were pretty broken. You know sometimes people will steer themselves away from broken people, and those are the people that have usually never been broken. But you see there’s nothing wrong with being broken, you can get fixed! You can fix yourself. Things break and then they get fixed, but usually with the help of other people. In China if a vase breaks they repair it and they draw a line, they draw a gold leaf where the crack was. They celebrate the cracks. We should celebrate what we’ve been through. It’s the people without the scars those are the ones you gotta worry about.”

This little monologue that he spoke has always stuck with me, for a couple of reasons. One, I shudder to think that there are people who are without scars. I think we’ve all been through some stuff. I know I have. I think there is a part of me that is ashamed of my scars. How do you celebrate parts of your life that you’re ashamed of? I think that was a lesson that he was trying to teach or share.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. Now, to know me is to know that music is a major part of my life. Over the last few years I’ve been really into Rise Against. I simply love their lyrics. They recently put out a record called The Ghost Note SymphoniesVolume 1. They did acoustic versions of their own songs. It’s brilliant. At least to me.

There’s a song on this record called "Far From Perfect." This song appears on their last record called Wolves, and I’ve liked it since I first heard it, but this version is just phenomenal. It’s so stripped down and beautiful, and you can really take the lyrics in.

The first set of lyrics that struck a chord in me are, “meanwhile the cracks have formed on the masks we’ve worn until now.” When I first was able to decipher these lyrics, I said to myself, “whoa, there’s the thing about cracks!” I was kind of dumbfounded that the words that I heard five years ago had come around and hit me again. What did it mean? I really started to listen to the song. It got me thinking: Do we all wear masks? Do I wear a mask? Is my mask cracked? What if the cracks in my mask are the stories from my past that I’ve told? If that’s what this means, then yes I wear a mask. And if my mask has cracks, well then there are a few more cracks to come. I haven’t come to terms with everything just yet. I’ve even said to one of my closest friends, there are two to three stories you don’t know yet. So I guess there are a couple of more cracks to come in my mask.

The other day I was driving to meet some friends for breakfast. I was listening to the song for the 900th consecutive time and for some reason the final verse hit me like a left cross, but instead of pain, uncontrollable tears started to flow. “What the shit is happening?!” I thought. The verse goes: “with every color we shine! A tapestry of scars! Without regret we’re growing stronger, finding right ways despite the wrong ones, we’re clearing paths we’re locked by storms, we’re finding beauty in what you’ve ignored!”

Those words even now while writing this cause tears for me. First off, “a tapestry of scars"?!!!? How fucking brilliant is that line? If I was creative enough to come up with a string of words like that I would be a full time writer. The last line though, gets me in the heart.

At first I couldn’t comprehend it. It didn’t make sense to me, then suddenly, it did. These words are the same as “celebrating the cracks.” At least, that’s what it means to me. Maybe I’ve been suppressing some stuff from my past that I’m ashamed of. Who am I kidding, I totally am. I guess it’s time to start to celebrate those few things. I’m not exactly sure how to do that. I will try, though. I know that I have people in my life that I trust enough with those few stories and they won’t look down on me.

That’s why we hide things, right, because we are ashamed or we are self conscious? What’s the point in hiding. If there is beauty in what I’ve been ignoring, or hiding why not let it out and free myself of it. Let the people who know me best really get to know the whole me. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, these stories are part of who make me, me.

I think that in writing this I’ve discovered that I may have been showing myself and those closest to me a disservice, and keeping my walls up or wearing my mask. Now is as good a time as any to take my mask off. It’s time to stop being a victim of my past; my past does not define me. Just because the past had been difficult doesn’t mean that the future and the now can’t be great. Learning that now.