The Scar Wasn’t the Thing That Needed Fixing

Every scar. Every wrinkle. Every line.

Every place where life slipped, cut too deep, broke something, or changed the shape of what I thought I was going to become.

Evidence.

The Mendmark

I was here. Something happened. I responded. I changed. I continued.

Women are taught to erase the evidence.

Smooth the lines. Cover the scars. Fix the flaws. Reverse the aging. Restore what was damaged. Somehow return ourselves to the pristine version we were before life had the audacity to happen to us.

No.

I don’t want to be restored to the woman I was before.

I earned this woman.

Today, my hand slipped while I was making an Ari.

The tool went somewhere I hadn’t intended it to go. It left an irregular scar in the wood. I could have tried to hide it. Fill it. Sand it. Disguise it. Make the artifact look like nothing had ever happened. I could try to polish it and work it and blend it and wear it down until it surrendered…

Instead, I followed it.

I burned the scar. Filled the void with tungsten. Sealed it with resin. Then I took copper and formed it by hand to fit the shape that actually existed.

A Mendmark.

And somewhere in the making, I realized:

I didn’t try to mend the scar.

Because the scar wasn’t the thing that needed fixing.

I didn’t restore the artifact to the version it was supposed to be.

I continued making the version it had become.

That’s the Ghinari understanding of a Mendmark:

Being mended does not require pretending you were never wounded.

The Mendmark doesn’t erase what happened.

It doesn’t cover the evidence.

It acknowledges the place where something changed and honors what continued.

And maybe that’s why this way of making feels so deeply familiar to me.

Every scar on my body.

Every wrinkle on my face.

Every line.

Every thing I know now that I had to learn the hard fucking way.

I don’t want them erased. They are not evidence that I have been diminished.

They are evidence that I was here.

I survived, evolved, earned.

I did not come through unmarked.

I came through sharpened.