Millstones and Modesty
Content warning: self-injury
From a couple of inches above the knee to a few inches below the hip, the tops of my thighs are covered in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of scars. Many are small lines, scarcely distinguishable from the stretch marks seaming the inside of my thighs. Some are raised white weals, the scar tissue lighter and shinier than the surrounding skin. They are mostly old. After a deep cut scabs over, the scar shows up dark for the first year or two, and gradually fades into ghostliness.
Most people don’t see them, because I generally don’t wear shorts. I wear dresses all summer. I stopped wearing shorts because I couldn’t bear for people to comment on my scars. When I cut myself in places exposed by clothing, I tried to make it look like it could have been an accident. The scars on my legs are crosshatched, clearly deliberate, close-knit. Sometimes I imagine that they are a writing system, that if I study them with care I might discover what they signify.
I don’t think about the scars too much these days. The desire to self-injure is still present, but mostly muted; and my other coping mechanisms work well enough for me to make it through. Every six months or so, perhaps, I’ll have an especially bad day. The pull is too strong, my distress and loathing is too great, and another seam is ripped into the fabric of my body. I try not to be angry at myself when I do this. The only way out for me is through compassion.
When I was thirteen, my mother bought me a navy blue velvet dress. It was long and sleeveless and hugged my body. It had an embroidered flower on the bodice which I loved. I wore it to church that Sunday, thinking that for once I wouldn’t look scruffy and out of place among the designer dresses and furs that made up the congregation where my father was the rector. I added a pink lipstick I had scrounged from my older sister’s discards.
The children’s choir was singing that Sunday, so I was early to church. The choir director was a man I’d known since I was five, who came over for dinner and taught me songs on canoe trips. He raised an eyebrow. “That’s a very…grownup dress,” he said. The words sounded like a compliment, but there was something in his face that I didn’t understand. It made me uncomfortable.
Somehow, the dress was wrong. Or rather, I was wrong in the dress. My body was wrong, this new body I had. It was changing faster than my parents’ clothing budget for me would allow — hence the new dress. It was changing into something I didn’t understand. Even now my breasts were the wrong size for the bras available at department stores: the bands were too loose, the cups too tight; my breasts sagged and swayed or migrated over the top of the bra cups, while the underwire rubbed my sternum raw. My father shouted at me when my bra straps were exposed, but bateau necks and spaghetti straps were ubiquitous in the late 90s. And when I didn’t wear a bra, I got even more looks and comments that let me know that my body was wrong.
I should note that I knew what sex was at this point, and I wanted it. My omnivorous, precocious reading had encompassed a fair amount of erotica. My classmates were giving each other blow jobs during church lock-ins. I wanted sex, and I wanted to be sexy. But sexy at thirteen meant small and blonde and skinny, not big soft tits with a belly to match and towering over the boys. I didn’t want…this.
Thinking back, I suspect that what I saw reflected on the faces of the older men around me was shame. They knew I was a child. They knew I was playing dress-up, pretending to be a grown-up by putting adult clothes on my new grown-up body. They didn’t know that I was raised by a single father, or that my mother had her own nightmares around adolescent sexuality and encouraged me to dress older than my age, or that most of my “new” clothes were hand-me-downs from adult women. They saw me, thirteen years old, five foot eight and with a rack like Jessica Rabbit, and desired me; and they were ashamed of their desire for me. But then they took that shame and they put it on me, and I learned that it was my own shame. And I carried it within me for years, the deep sick feeling that there was something dreadfully wrong with me. The sickness and disgust swelled within me, heavy as a plum, until one day I learned to open up my skin and let it drip out.
That’s not the only thing my scars mean, of course. There’s a lot more there — suffering, and secrecy, and the desire to make despair visible. But this shame is one of the things they signify.
I thought about these things today, as a couple of Catholic priests took to Twitter to champion ‘modesty’ in dress. And I thought about Jesus, and children, and Luke 17:1–2: “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come! It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble.’” And then I cried, because I have spent so long carrying a shame that is not my own. I cried because I spent so many years unable to see the ways my body was created in the image of God, unable to use my body with the freedom and playfulness which God desires for me. I cried, because my scars will never go away.
