There was this scene in the first episode of BBC’s Sherlock where Sherlock does a Sherlock guessing Watson’s sibling’s life circumstances by taking one look at the phone he’s using. The phone had several scuff marks near the charging port and Sherlock somehow deduced that only a person with shaky hands would make that many attempts to plug a cable. It was impressive and all but something else about that observation felt warm to me. My phone now, a five-year-old rose gold iPhone 5 SE (which I bought after breaking a five-year-old first gen iPhone 5–I’m all about pocketability over photo quality, ask my friends), has these really deep dents all around it, wear-and-tear and weathering and stubborness against using phone cases (because if it needs a phone case, what are you paying so much more for).

I love these marks. I didn’t know that not everybody loves their stuff getting banged around with something to show for it. I have the same affection for scuff marks with all my other electronics, my tumbler, my fountain pens, even books. Especially books. If they’re my books, the only sort of proof I have in my weird brain that I love a book is if it’s worn, hesitantly dog-eared in some places, has tentative scribbles on the side or arrogant orange highlights every page or so. If it has random inserts and ephemera: bus tickets, a list of new words to learn, string, and other emergency bookmarks.

I knock around my fountain pens a lot (fountain pen users actually call their workhorse pens knockarounds, mine are pangharabas) and I never get upset when a new dent appears. To me, it’s always been a cost of living, an occupational hazard, almost.

Let’s go further, except for my chicken pox scars, which are too round and perfect (exactly why I hate them), I love all my other scars. Scars are stories. The oldest identifiable scar I have on my right leg was from when I was trying to make the neighbors laugh by pretending to fall from where I was standing and landed on a pair of scissors which I had on the bed. I still remember the blood and the tiny bit of fat poking out and my heart racing when the blood won’t stop coming. How I did not get tetanus I’ll never understand. I like the one where my appendix exited my body, I like the one where a lump in my right breast was excised, I even like the tiny peeler injury in my right hand from peeling and juicing too many goddamn carrots for my dad who was battling cancer at the time.

It feels like I lived.

In recent months I’ve tried to tackle a bigger kind of scar, the childhood kind, the kind I didn’t even know I had. I’ve spent a crazy amount of time on psychology and science-backed self-empowerment (yeah yeah self-help rebrand) books not getting the message. All I’ve ever seen was, and all they’ve ever told me (see happiness set points and cortical lotteries in The Happiness Hypothesis, which I still clearly remember even after losing the book to someone who borrowed it and forgot), was that if you were born with a sad brain, you’re screwed. OR, if you were born with a sad brain and you had a sad childhood, you were hopeless. I wasn’t even angry at what that meant for me, I was angry at the injustice of what these “facts” seemed to imply, that certain things that happen early in life, when your brain is still forming, can fuck you up for life.

That seems unfair for a vast majority of people who were born into regular families, families without the resources to meet the basics of food, shelter, education, much less self-fucking-actualization, or even just the mental space to think beyond tomorrow’s domestic issues. Or even the privilege of knowing and learning love as a language. When you’re mired in the hustle because your survival is at stake, you don’t really grow any concern for the society that ensured you be struggling every minute of the day. You just don’t. You don’t develop thoughts about improving the world that doesn’t have a lick of violence in it. Or you do, but you know even that is a defence mechanism: to admit that the world doesn’t like you enough to take care of you is very soul-crushing you HAVE to pretend there’s a reason for everything, that a higher power was in charge of everything and you were allowed this challenge because you are strong. The best of the best. A warrior. A soldier. (A war pawn.)

I’m not going to debate that point of view, because some of the kindest people I know are believers, and I am, too, kind of a believer in something ineffable, but why this matters to me now is because all the books don’t really offer me tools that I understand. If you have a sad brain, or was never taught self-discipline, how in hell will you be able to start the kind of change that will change your life? What if waking up was a daily battle? What if doing stuff feels pointless? How do you fight? How the fuck do you apply things consistently enough when you just don’t really care enough?

(This is where this original post stops, as this was written at some point in 2021, but I think I have the answer now, if not the solution.)

At some point down that trip, and it was since reading/hearing about it that I stopped looking, I learned about a theory that there was a hidden, core, subconscious container of all our selves that was not molded off of childhood programming or teenage trauma. Practitioners of that modality continue to find that even the most sick and evil of humanity have this, and that only after working through all the learned, maladaptive behavior do we learn to trust it enough to take over.

Sometimes knowing that is enough, sometimes, I imagine, it makes us all equal. In those moments, I can dream as if I had the self-discipline to pursue my goals, I can plan as if my baser instincts do not exist. I doubt I’ll ever reach total integration, but the thought that I have not been battered so bad that I lost the essence of who I was is the most comforting thought I’ve had all year. Maybe we all reach that realization on our own, some earlier than others, some without the need for help. Some maybe never do.

It’s only fitting, I think, that my internal battles found the most conducive arena during the pandemic, where for the most part the only person I’ve spent the most time with is myself (my selves). Maybe your enlightenment came when you realized you liked doing a certain thing, or, because you’ve been deprived of social interaction, you saw the extent to which you would drop everything to see your friends again. Or maybe you realized that the isolation looks good on you, and now you fear having to get back into normal life.

But other than that unabashedly optimistic view of mental health, the thing that keeps me hooked to the theory the most, is when, in conversations with the parts of us that we don’t like: the part that wastes time ruminating before you get out of bed, the part that binges, the part that drinks a little too much, the part that answers back, the goal is never to eliminate the part. The goal is to ask why that part acts the way it does. If you ask gently enough, and mindfully enough, it will tell you, even the part that commits heinous crimes, that it is doing this to protect you. And because you are asking gently, you know enough not to be scandalized by what it’s saying.

How can overeating be protecting me? How can ruminating be good? How can lashing out and becoming violent be an act of love toward oneself? They are not excuses, of course, of course. Justice is a natural reparation the part will want for itself to be at peace. But in the moment that the bigger you understands that, you will hopefully realize there’s no need to hate yourself. The part will tell its story to you, and over time, when it finally feels seen, when the part finally trusts that you are no longer a child, the part relaxes out of its self-assigned role.

In theory it means you’ll be free to do what you set out to do in the world, without all the fear and back story and doubt and self-hate. You’ll be free to rest, without guilt. You’ll be free to enjoy the things you like, without thinking that you should be doing something else.

I guess a part of me really did know enough in the beginning to understand that the scars in our lives are beautiful and ours alone. That they should be celebrated, even more than our stereotypical achievements, because it is through the tough times we often have to choose to be who we want to be.