Your Scars Are Your Qualifications

I have a psychology degree. I earned it properly, in my sixties, sitting exams alongside people young enough to be my grandchildren. It taught me a lot. But it isn't where most of what I know actually comes from.

What I actually know comes from walking away from a faith community I'd been part of for thirty-five years and finding out who I was without it.

It comes from a 29-year marriage ending.

It comes from watching a new partner get a breast cancer diagnosis four weeks after we got together, and from finding out what "in sickness and in health" means when you've barely had time to learn each other's coffee order.

None of that was theoretical. Nobody can Google their way to knowing what it actually feels like at 2am when your old identity has gone and the new one hasn't turned up yet.

That kind of knowing only comes from having been in it.

And when I;’ve sat across from someone at a cafe, listening, asking questinsand offering support, the most useful ideas and advice have not come from my knowledge or corporate experience. They’ve come from my own lessons resulting from lived experiences.

That's where the true value is.

Parker J Palmer, one off my favourite authors, puts it this way. “The best teachers don’t teach out of what they know. They teach out of who they are.”

Here's the thing about scars: they're not just evidence that something hurt. They're proof you found a way through. And the particular shape of your scars — your divorce, your redundancy, your diagnosis, your falling out with a faith or a family or a version of yourself — is exactly the terrain someone else is about to enter for the first time, frightened, with no map.

They don't need another expert reciting theory at them. They need someone who's actually been in the dark and found the door. You already are that person for someone, whether you've realised it yet or not.

Your failures taught you things your successes never could.

That's not a consolation prize.

That's the qualification.

Use it to do good in the world.