Geometry Of Bruises

It’s cold outside, which means my left foot is having a quiet conversation with the atmosphere. There’s a ridge of scar tissue there, roughly the shape of a jagged exclamation mark... a little internal weather station built from a mistake I made when I was nine.

I can still feel the specific heat of that afternoon.

I remember the red paint, or was it blue, of the bicycle, the physics of taking a turn too fast, and then the sudden, intimate violence of skin meeting gravel. It didn’t just sting; it burned, a hot, scraping erasure of the self I was five seconds prior.

Most of us spend the rest of our lives trying to sand down those edges. We treat our history like a drywall project - spackle over the holes, paint it white, pretend the structural damage never happened. We want to present a seamless narrative to the world, a smooth, polished surface where the light glides off without catching a snag.

But here’s the thing about smooth surfaces... they’re slippery.

You can’t get a grip on them.

I’ve been thinking about metallurgy lately. Specifically, the concept of work hardening. If you take a pristine piece of copper and bend it, you’re introducing defects into the crystal lattice. Dislocations. Chaos.

To a perfectionist, you’ve ruined the metal.

But to an engineer? You’ve just made it stronger. The dislocations get tangled up in each other, preventing the layers from sliding. The trauma literally locks the structure into place. The metal gains its integrity because it was forced to accommodate a stress it didn’t ask for.

We are not copper, obviously. We’re softer, messier stuff. But the logic holds.

A mind without splinters is just a mirror - reflecting everything, holding nothing.

We get obsessed with the idea of cognitive dissonance being a bad thing; that uncomfortable hum when our beliefs don’t match our reality. We try to resolve it immediately, usually by lying to ourselves. But maybe we should let it sit. That hum is the sound of the mind stretching.

It’s the friction.

And you need friction to move.

There’s that Japanese art form, Kintsugi - you know the one, repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. It’s beautiful, sure, but I think we miss the point when we fetishise the gold. The value isn’t in the shiny metal; the value is in the admission that the pot broke in the first place. It’s the refusal to hide the history of the object.

It’s saying, “This held tea. Then it fell. Now it holds tea again, but with a different geometry.”

If you are seamless, you are featureless. I don’t trust people who haven’t been knocked down, who haven’t had to reconstruct their worldview from the shards of a failed idea or a broken heart.

They lack the structural density that comes from repair. They have no grip.

When the world gets oily and chaotic, the seamless people slide right off. It’s the damaged ones, the ones with the jagged edges, the dislocations, the poorly healed fractures, who have something to hang onto.

So, don’t be so quick to buff out the scratches. That cognitive dissonance you’re feeling? That memory you keep trying to edit into something palatable?

Leave it rough. Let it snag on things. That’s not a defect. That’s your traction.

The cold is letting up now, but the knee still aches. Good. It reminds me I’m still here, and I’m distinct from the chair I’m sitting in.

Perfection is a myth we sell to ghosts.

For the rest of us, there is only the beautiful, sturdy geometry of our bruises.