two very important takeaways from Khaled Hosseini's 'And the Mountains Echoed'...
There is a character in the story - Thalia - who as a child had the lower part of the left side of her face bitten off by a dog. She drapes a mask over the lower part of her face. Her own mother cannot handle the situation, and eventually leaves her with her best friend, a no-nonsense, good person, Odie, a schoolteacher who lives with her son, Markos. Odie tells Thalia that she was not ashamed of her so Thalia could take off her mask if she wanted to - which eventually she does...not an easy thing to do. With Odie at her back and beside her, she braves it out...all the stares and gasps and comments.....and begins a new chapter in her life. Later, when Markos becomes a plastic surgeon and tells Thalia, who by now is like a sister to him, that he will fix her face, she refuses.
My takeaways from this episode:
One is about Markos deciding on plastic surgery as his field of specialization. He learned 'the world didn't see the inside of you, it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that.' And he sets out to right this for people.
And the other is what Thalia says when she refuses Markos' offer to reconstruct her face. She says: "This is who I am." She says it with full acceptance - no self-pity, or self-sympathy---Just a definite acceptance taking shape slowly over the years slowly but surely molding itself into an identity...her own identity...an identity that she has created for herself and of which she is not ashamed...thus leading her own life to its fullest...
We do tend to limit ourselves to what we look like on the outside without taking the time or the effort or the trouble to fix the inside...Of course the outside is important, but not without the wholly-healed-and-fixed-and right inside...