In high school, our driving instructor was Mr. Beverly. He was an odd man, but I learned to parallel park from him and consider myself a safe driver.

Anyways, Mr. Beverly had a large L shaped scar on his chin. He had colloids so it was pretty pronounced. As teenagers are want to do, we showed little reservations on quizzing him about said scar. His answer was always different but followed a theme:

“Me and 18 girls in one elevator. It. Was. Awful!”
“Me and 18 girls on one bicycle. It. Was. Awful!”
“Me and 18 girls in one bumper car. It. Was. Awful!”

You get the idea. I never learned how it really happened or how many girls were actually involved. But he was good-natured about the questions.

Yesterday, Rich left for his hockey game while Ian and I were supposed to follow along after a bit to watch it. In the two hours between when he left the house and reunited with us after the game, I managed to split Ian’s lip open with my fingernail getting him in his car seat and he then fell in the parking lot and bloodied his nose. No scars … yet. But Rich’s first question was definitely “what the hell happened and why is our son covered in blood?” I just responded, “you shoulda seen the other guy!”

All this got me thinking on the physical features we have. Some may be that elephant in the room like Mr. Beverly’s chin and some may be more subtle. Are they all as noticeable to others as they are to ourselves?

Miss Britt wrote a whole post recently about her eyes and how much they’ve pained her in life while I’m much more captivated by her curly hair and great smile. And then Karen Walrond (who I LOVE!) just published her book called the Beauty of Different. Her trailer has photos of so many lovely people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and they have qualities that make them unique, some of which they may have wished didn’t exist but make them interesting to others. Stephanie Nielson was badly burned in a plane crash, but finds so much joy in just being alive it’s contagious.

What about you makes you physically different (and by Karen’s definition beautiful)? Have you always felt this way about yourself? Tell us about your scars, either the ones we can see or the hidden ones. What’s that thing a little kid would ask you even though it would mortify his or her parents?

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I’m just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don’t email me, I’m likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, December 5th (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

Explain those elephants away!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2010 at 4:07 pm and is filed under Living Out Loud, Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.