About a bazillion years ago when I was 21, six months after a very nasty car wreck I ended up in the hospital again for over a month during which time they removed my spleen, part of my intestine and a bit of my pancreas. For a couple of months I wore a colostomy bag on my side. I won’t go into the gory details of what a colostomy bag is but suffice it to say that everything we would normally do out of one area of our bodies, is done in that bag from our side. During the time of “the bag”, I learned how truly painful it could be to do that thing out of my side that had earned me the childhood nickname of “Beans. I was one of the lucky ones because eventually the bag came off and the two holes in my side became scars. I have another large scar that runs from just under my breastbone down and around my belly button to just above my nether regions. For some time, having scars like these was quite traumatic for me since that was the time in my life when the most important thing to me was having a flat, if not concave, stomach. Somehow I just couldn’t picture myself walking around in a bikini ever again—what with—-looking like I had three belly buttons!!

Span forward a few decades to a wedding I went to a couple of weekend’s ago for my BFF from high school’s big sister’s wedding. During the reception my friend took my hand and with a mischievous glint in her eye laid it upon a very soft padding on her tummy. Who would have thought that we would share the same experience of having had a colostomy bag and all the things that go with it? Somehow my friend almost made wearing a colostomy bag a cool accessory to have, almost, even if she had nicknamed the bag and created stories about it for the entertainment of anyone around her.

This afternoon I interviewed a woman who is a coach, author, speaker and minister. Her name is Judy Winkler and her latest book is “Get Unstuck: Live With Ease”. Judy has scars too only her scars aren’t from having a colostomy but rather the inner emotional scars that are sometimes harder to see but nevertheless as big (if not bigger to overcome). As I took off around the neighborhood for my afternoon jog, I realized that all of us have some kind of scar or branding from living our lives here on planet Earth that show that we have endured and overcome. And actually those scars are a good thing because they let other people know that we are real, that we are fallible and that we have healed.

I think that acknowledging and talking about our scars and telling the stories of how they got there and what we did to overcome them needs to be talked about and healing conversations can begin.

What do your scars tell us about you today?