Sunshine and Scars

Trigger warning: this piece discusses sensitive subjects, such as mental illness, with a primary focus on self-harm and mention of suicide. Please read no further if these are triggering topics to you.

I’m sitting in my grandparents’ back garden. It’s a tiny square of grass, really, plonked somewhere in Coatbridge. But closing my eyes in this 29-degree heat, with tropical tunes playing through my headphones, I try to cast my mind somewhere abroad. The only thing missing is a pool. Or a turquoise-blue sea. Ideally also a cocktail in a coconut. The call of an exotic songbird to replace the incessant squawking coming from the neighbour’s hedge, which I can’t discern between cat or seagull.

Just a few things. But it’ll do for now.

The peaceful mindset doesn’t follow my meditative mental imagery, no matter how appealing I try to make it, and how many deep breaths-in-and-out I take. I am uncomfortable. Not in a physical, sweaty, suncream-sticky overheating way – though that also isn’t helping – but in my mind. I’m sitting here in a bikini, a feat I’m still to become accustomed to following 5 years of an insufferable combination of both not being ‘allowed’ to wear one, and my own rabid body dysmorphia. Fenced in and hidden from view, I still feel exposed.

It isn’t only the fact that around 90% of my skin is on show, including a new stomach I’m desperately failing to come to accept after having gained what I know is healthy weight. My scars are also on full display. The older ones, bright white. The newer ones, pink and sensitive. I’m used to seeing them, sure. I live with them, they’re part of my body now. But the sun and my somewhat lucky ability to tan is able to unearth those that generally blend into my typically-Scottish, chalk white skin. And wearing a bikini reveals others I’d mastered the art of concealing throughout the years. Those I wasn’t quite friends with yet.

I open my eyes again. My thoughts won’t quiet. I look down. The first thing to catch my eye are the scars on my lower stomach. They ran in different directions. These were especially thin, usually hidden both by my paleness and by my clothing. They were a few years old, too. More faded. But still they remain a whispered memory of words once carved there. I don’t remember what the words were. I try to trace the lines to work it out and snatch my hand back just as quickly. Unlike those which decorate my arms and thighs, these weren’t ones I was fully acquainted with yet.

My gaze fixates on the rest of my lower body like it does when I beach clean. A trained eye able to pick out plastics hidden by sand or detangle wet wipes from seaweed, could now spot more scars that followed the shape of my hips and waist with almost illuminated clarity. These were unfamiliar still, too. Like those on my stomach, I acknowledge their existence, but am still to accept them. Surprisingly, my thoughts didn’t transport me back to the scenes of the self-infliction, as I expected. Maybe my mind had locked those memories away, in some Pandora’s box containing my hardest of times, firmly locked by trauma response. They weren’t thoughts I was particularly keen to revisit, anyway.

Self-harm is a harsh word. Suicide the same. I dance around using both, which I know that in the world of mental illness treatment is the exact opposite of what to do. I resonate too closely with them. They leave a hollow feeling in my chest and sinking in my stomach. As if the whole class has turned to stare at me when my name has been called, whenever those words are mentioned.

Not as though I haven’t been horrendously, indiscreetly stared at in-person before, however, when ‘braving’ – as some would say – to wear a skirt or shorts in public view. Glances, fine. But staring? Let’s not, please.

In my better states, I’m quick to make the optimistic social media post about ‘doing okay now’. How everything looks up. I’m ‘getting there’. I’m ‘happy’. Usually accompanied by some select photos of my smiling moments, or a compilation of videos from precious snapshots of life, to prove my point. To give others hope.

There is a degree of truth behind those posts when I make them. Though I will admit now that my heart may not be fully in the messaging. I do believe that there is hope and that we have to keep going, that life is out there to be lived. I stand by that no matter how dark the cloud covering. But I’ve begun to accept that I am, still, struggling. And potentially still as badly as I was as a teenager, just now I’ve learned how to ground myself better when I panic, I can recognise when a bad spell is coming, I can keep myself safer than I could before. But, my depression is still heavy. I’m still unpacking known traumas and unlocking more. And on my worst of days I can feel those self-harming and suicidal tendencies peering at me from the black back of my mind. Today, most of the time, I can keep them at bay. But I can’t positive-post pretend they aren’t there.

They’re here now. Here despite the sunshine, despite the barbecues I can smell from across the cul-de-sac, and the happy squeals of kids chasing each other with water guns. Despite the anticipated orange-pink glow of a summer sunset sky, which is one of my most favourite sights in the world. I know they’re here, those little demons of mine, because the past few months have been full of goodbyes. My best friend moved to Orkney to start a new job, and I’m overjoyed for him, but I can’t help but feel sad longing for the summer we’d dreamed of celebrating post-graduation, running riot across Scotland. Venturing abroad if our limited student funds would allow. Even just finishing The Office. The fact that it took me so long to open myself up to someone to the way I did him, to finally, after so many years, have made such a wonderful, close friend in him, and now we were separated by 211 miles. It was reminiscent of having had to say goodbye to my childhood best friend in primary, to another in high school. Here I was again, with another painful ‘see you later!’. I miss him, every day.

I’ve had to move out of my flat, too. And while I watch others around me having leaving dos and teas with friends, I quietly left my 4 years at Stirling behind. And for a short while, my independence is gone too, whilst I stay with my grandparents (and all thanks and love to them for putting me up in the meantime). This is hard to adapt to as well, alongside the current uncertainty of where I’m going and what I’m doing next, the desperate need to decompress following anxious job interviews and waiting for the outcomes. I’ve been rejected 4 times so far, without feedback. Avoiding checking my bank balance to prevent the knot in my stomach in seeing its deeply minus value. While I watch life progress for those around me, I, the person who everyone said would have no issues getting anywhere, am floundering behind.

I am struggling again. I can feel it in the heaviness of my thoughts, the complete drainage of motivation and my frequent disappearing under the covers for a depression nap. But I’m sitting here in the sun, and I’m looking at my scars, and they’re a reminder of the mental battles I’ve overcome. I’m also trying to photosynthesise some energy back into me. But my scars are a reminder that I am still capable of winning, of pushing on. Of living. I’ve been here before, and they’re testament to that.

I’ll make it through again, and make it through alive.

And I do believe that. I just might have to repeat it to myself like a mantra a couple hundred times, though.