Back Freckle

I was born with a heart-shaped vascular birthmark on my back.  When I was a kid my parents taught me to believe it was special. I remember not really understanding what they were talking about when they would carry on about my heart shaped birthmark. Of course when I got a little older and figured out how to use two mirrors to see my back, I examined the little red splotch thoroughly. It didn't look like a heart to me but I was never bothered by it.

Nearly every summer some kid at the lake or the pool would, in a panic, tell me my back was bleeding. I never blinked though, before I just explained to them that it was a birthmark.  

I have friends who refer to it (and to me) simply as Back Freckle, which I find funny and a pretty creative description of my red splotch. It's just one of those things that has always , literally, followed me around.  I've known people who rubbed it for luck, men who wanted to write their names on it (because of the heart-shaped thing that I still don't see) and people who have tried to persuade me to have it removed because of cancer risks they think are associated with it.

A few years ago I went to my doctor and asked about having it removed.  His answer was "absolutely not."  He said it was a harmless bundle of blood vessels that just happened to form above the skin and there was no need to remove it. So, I left it there.

For most of my adult life I've tried to keep it covered, but in recent years I've relaxed a bit more. I wear lower backed blouses and tank tops without even thinking about the lowly back freckle.  Maybe I've let down my guard a bit too much though, because I think I crossed a boundary of some sort the other day when I asked a close friend to put lotion on my back. 

Not everyone is cool with ol' back freckle. In fact it apparently grosses some folks out pretty bad, which is something I never really considered.  But isn't it just like life to let you live for so many years without even realizing that the rest of the world is disgusted by some small physical flaw you have that you've never even thought twice about?

Point is, now I know that my birthmark is indeed, gross.  And that makes me wonder what else there is about me that makes other people want to lose their lunch.  My skin? My hair? My squishy body? For sure the tube in my belly, right? And maybe my ugly teeth...

The worst things about me I think are hidden away, but maybe they're more obvious than I think, and maybe I expect too much when I believe that anyone else could ever accept and embrace me for who I am.  Especially when it's very likely that I'm not even close to being the okay kind of person I think I am.