BEHIND THE SCARS: AN EDITORIAL REWRITE

Editor’s note: What follows is a structural and editorial rewrite of the original piece Demetrius Wright composed several years ago. Every idea, every image, every emotional truth belongs to him. What has changed is the architecture: sentences have been rebuilt for clarity and impact, the central metaphor has been sharpened, the rhetorical arc has been tightened, and places where syntax was fighting against meaning have been resolved. Nothing has been sanitized. Nothing has been softened. The voice is his. The blade is now just cleaner.

by Demetrius Wright

Understanding yourself is one of the hardest things a human being can attempt. And the more damaged the life, the harder the work becomes. When you have been wounded from childhood — cut so many times, over so many years, that your heart is encased in scar tissue — the challenge is not merely difficult. It is the central labor of your existence.

People need other people to heal. Healing does not happen in isolation. But here is the cruelty that no one talks about: the very wounds that demand connection are the wounds that drive others away. Scar tissue is ugly. It hardens a person. It makes them look like something they are not. And most people are incapable of seeing past it — incapable of hearing the story behind the scars, incapable of imagining the person buried underneath them. So the wounded one is wounded again, this time by rejection, by alienation, by the turning away of people who could have helped but chose not to look.

If you could come face-to-face with the truth of someone concealed behind their scars, you would understand how difficult it is to be them. You would understand why they flinch, why they push back, why they test every hand extended toward them.

I have known that turning away since childhood. I expect it from the uninformed, from people who have never studied what trauma does to a developing human being. That, I can absorb. What I cannot absorb — what still cuts — is the ignorance of the professionals. The social workers, the therapists, the case managers, and the people specifically assigned not only to help discover a path to healing but to prevent the wounds from being inflicted in the first place. These people, the ones with the training and the titles and the institutional authority, failed in the same fundamental way as everyone else: they saw the scars and mistook them for the person. They responded to the damage, not to the human being carrying it. They failed to see me for the same reason I failed to see myself.

To understand who I am, I had to understand what made me. Not the man I became, but the forces that warped a child into something so far from his own potential that the distance between who he was and who he could have been is almost unbearable to measure.

Think about what happens when an adult endures unnecessary suffering — physical pain, emotional devastation, the kind of harm that arrives without warning and without reason. However it comes, it is not an easy burden. But at least an adult has acquired some capacity to absorb the blow. At least an adult has, hopefully, built up enough internal architecture to keep from being destroyed completely.

Now consider a child.

A child whose natural abilities exist only as potential. A child who is beaten, sexually abused, and emotionally starved of everything required for healthy development. Not for a week. Not for a year. For the first decade and a half of its life.

What is the logical result?

Was it the intent of God that I would become something monstrous — an aberration so far from the human norm that even professionals trained to understand me could not see me? Was it fate that placed me in the hands of people too broken to build anything other than what they themselves had been built by — destruction, despair, and the repetition of harm? Or was it something more ordinary and more damning: incompetence, negligence, institutional bias, and a system that failed at every level where intervention was possible?

It does not matter which answer you choose. Not for healing. Blaming others — the social services system, the adoptive family, the biological family, the cold and uncaring society we all inhabit — gets me nowhere. Blame is irrelevant to the work of self-repair.

But.

At some point, those factors become deeply relevant. Not for blame, but for explanation. Not for excuses, but for prevention. If we do not name what went wrong, and where, and why, we cannot stop it from happening to the next child sitting in the same system, under the same broken hands, absorbing the same wounds that no one can be bothered to prevent.

I decided to let go of bitterness, rage, resentment, and unforgiveness. Not because I had to. Because I chose to. Ownership of the whole matter — every part of it, the parts that were done to me and the parts I did to others — is now mine and mine alone.

That is far from easy.

Knowing what you now know about my life, would you want to own it? Would you want to carry memories like these — memories attached to experiences that were always out of your control, or that at least felt that way, even in the moments when this was not entirely the case?

I own it anyway.

That is where we start.