Birthmark Society

Excuse me for breaking free from my regular subject matter to say something about May being vascular birthmark awareness month. (May 15th specifically being birthmark awareness day.) Some may be rolling their eyes and saying to themselves "Do we really need another awareness day?" Well, as the old saying goes “First seek to understand, then to be understood.” While such days may always start as an invitation to understand. One cannot help if some merely see it as a demand to be understood. The easiest thing in the world to do is dismiss someone who dismisses you first. So an innocent invite can easily escalate into a demand when people refuse to allow their assumptions to be disrupted. No wonder there is so little understanding these days.

With that out of the way, as someone who has a prominent birthmark here is what it has taught me about humanity. Despite all our virtue signaling, and conditioned tact, there are still a lot of shallow and superficial people out there. You would be hard-pressed to convince me that people are basically good because of it. It’s one of multiple reasons I tend to distrust people. That’s one of the biggest demons I wrestle with right now. I get judged for that too, but humanity in general earned that distrust, so their judgment carries little weight with me. Which brings me to the flip side of it. This has taught me not to be motivated by acceptance, approval, and validation. This frees me to pursue my genuine interests, rather than what the world around me wants to validate. Let’s face it, we live in an age where acceptance is so coveted, that you can get people to do just about anything if you only validate it. 

Children will ask straightforward questions about my birthmark out of curiosity, and I don’t fault them for it. I usually tell them I’m part leopard and those are my spots. Most are smart enough to know I’m teasing them, but it does defuse the spook factor of it. Unlike a bunch of technical jargon. Even adults would not likely know what a Nevus Flammeus is after all. The caveat to that is that autistic kids have responded in absolute terror, regardless of the type of language I’ve used.

As kids age to the middle and high school range, curiosity tends to turn to disgust. This is where the bullying ramps up over inconsequential differences, making them seem very consequential. This is a time when the desire for acceptance, approval, and validation goes into high gear after all. This is where our culture starts to faction off. When individuals start to compromise themselves for the sake of being part of a peer group. Even so-called counter-cultural groups do so collectively. While they may choose to dis-identity with the mainstream because the mainstream rejected them first. They are still doing so in a formula way for the sake of having a peer group. As Eric Hoffer Once said. “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.” Yet having a superficial difference of any kind can disqualify you from such foolishness.

Adults tend to make assumptions about it. A rash or burn is the most common in my case. That’s how adults are, once you get to a certain age you try to make everything fit into what you already know. Instead of assuming you haven’t seen everything yet. Many will even assume you are lying, even after telling them the truth. Especially when you are a kid. Being constantly disbelieved for telling the truth as a kid didn’t exactly increase my faith in humanity. However, with my birthmark being on my arm and chest I tend to have a different experience than those with a mark on their face. That conditioned politeness keeps most adults from asking me about it most of the time. They usually have to get comfortable around me first to ask about it. Hard to say how many don’t get comfortable with me because of it though. But it seems having a mark on the face tends to stretch the limits of manners as I hear it. With that being said, senior citizens can revert back to a childlike wonder about it in their final years.

Some people just love to be cruel regardless though. You can regulate “hate speech” all you want, but in the end, it just makes the fruit forbidden, i.e. more desirable to the sadistic. If people want to wear their ugliness on their sleeve like that, then so be it. It’s a red flag for decent souls. The thing is, people wouldn’t flaunt their ugliness like that if someone wasn’t encouraging it, or if it wasn’t attracting like-minded people to them. Yet it may go deeper than that. When a person makes another uncomfortable, the uncomfortable person often tries to shame the person triggering their discomfort. They want you to hate yourself for disturbing the illusion inside the bubble they live in. In hopes that you will steer clear of their hair triggers. For example, there are YouTube channels run by amputees sharing their experiences. Which is a great resource for recent amputees to adapt and adjust to their new situations. Yet some pathetic people will report these videos as disturbing imagery. A testament to how individuals think their comfort is more important than other people's trauma. This is exactly why I don’t hide my birthmark, or even get laser treatments for it. If you are really that shallow, I’d just assume know about it up front. Yet, I may delight in triggering your superficial nature. Besides, who am I to change God’s work. However, I do recognize if my birthmark was on my face, or it grew and thickened like many vascular birthmarks do, I may feel very differently. The trauma caused by basically good people would surely be on another level.

I am so much more than my birthmark, identity is more than skin deep after all. Yet, I do recognize its presence has shaped who I am. Not the mark itself, but how it has affected my relationships with others. Sure I could go to great efforts to try and convince the world to feel about me the way I think they should. Since we live in a culture that wraps so much of our self-worth in our relationships. Or I can just live my own life without revolving it around the people who hate me for dumb reasons. While promoting understanding can be a good thing, yet if you're basing your happiness and fulfillment on everyone feeling the way you want them to, you are just setting yourself up for misery. If people were that reasonable, we wouldn’t even be discussing this in the first place.

The Visual PARABLEist

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