(Not) Scarred

"Are you this way because your face looks like (beep) !?"

I was confused. What was wrong with his face?

I was watching Pay It Forward and apparently one of the characters had burn scars all over his face. Somehow, that totally escaped me. I just assumed that he had some sort of rash or unnatural pre-aging.

Maybe it's because I've always been scarred.

When I was one, I apparently crawled into the kitchen and hot boiling water was accidentally poured all over my arm. I must have burned and screamed because my cotton jacket soaked up all the boiling liquid and when that was torn off of me, so was the skin on my arms. The old lady who took care of me calmed me down and put toothpaste on my burn. Thank God she wasn't a big fan of the mint kinds. Two weeks later, my skin grew back at an amazing rate, but started to connect my upper and lower arm together in an unholy angle. I could no longer straighten my arms. I spent two years doing physical therapy, always photographed looking slightly clueless and with my arm wound in a tight white gauze.

But when the bandages came off for the last time, I never thought twice about that browned tear drop that sits on the uneven patch of skin on my arm. It was a part of me; it was me. Better yet, it was a constant reminder, a souvenir of sorts, of the kind old lady who took care of me and loved me. My recent addition to the collection on my arm seems oddly appropriate. It has, after all, been twenty years.

Perhaps because I've always lived with and not really noticing a burn that made my fifth grade best friend gasp the first time she noticed it, I don't really see the scars on people.

Maybe that's why when I watched this mormon message video yesterday and saw a photo of Stephanie Nielson -- mother-of-four, blogger, and a victim of a burn on 80% of her body -- all I saw was a beautiful, kind woman. And I cried. Because I actually noticed her burns, and yet when she speaks, I didn't notice them at all.