00:00Every morning when I look in the mirror, it's weird because I'm just looking at a face that's
00:05different.
00:06I'm looking at history and experience, opportunity.
00:10Hey, my name's Jesse, and this is how my scars have come to tell my story.
00:14When I was 18, I was drinking and driving, and I got into a life-changing car accident.
00:19I invited two friends over to help me pack, and we started drinking some wine that my
00:24parents had, and then thought it would be a good idea to drive across the state from
00:29Spokane, Washington, where my parents lived, to Seattle, where I had a bunch of friends
00:33because I wanted to say goodbye to them before I moved to London.
00:37My best friend Kelly was in the passenger seat, and my cousin Ryan was driving, and I was in
00:43the back seat, and I just tapped Kelly on the shoulder, and I just said, switch me seats.
00:48Just switch me seats.
00:49I want to get in the front.
00:50And I finished a bottle of wine, and I passed it over to Ryan, my cousin, driving, and I
00:55asked him to throw it out the window.
00:56He rolled down his window, and as he threw it out the window, he just kind of jerked
01:01the wheel.
01:01And he somehow lost control of the wheel and drove into the center median, and then the
01:08car turned on its side.
01:09And as soon as it turned on its side, my neck snapped and broke, and my head broke the window,
01:15and then the car just slit.
01:17It's weird being as honest about this story as possible because for many years after the
01:22accident, I never admitted that it was a drunk driving accident.
01:25The road, the pavement, ripped from here to here, across here, across here, all the way
01:33off.
01:34So I lost my right ear, and I broke my skull, and I broke my second vertebrae, and my eyelids
01:38were ripped open.
01:39After I was in the ICU, the doctors actually moved me to the burn ward because the scarring
01:44came, and the injuries were so bad from the road that they resembled burns.
01:48The doctors were actually amazed that I was still alive, let alone that I was able to walk
01:52or think clearly.
01:53But I actually healed completely.
01:55I've had no skin grafts.
01:56They didn't have to do any sort of reconstruction in the way that they thought they were going
02:01to, which is really insane.
02:02My eardrum ruptured, and they grow back.
02:05I still have perfect hearing.
02:06My eyelids were ripped open.
02:08I have 20-20 vision.
02:09It's such an insane thing to have it be so terrible and so incredible at the same time.
02:15And I don't take that for granted, and I don't compartmentalize that.
02:18I bring that into the rest of my life constantly.
02:21These scars have made me feel just about any which way that I could possibly feel.
02:29It preoccupied a lot of my thought.
02:31I was below zero.
02:32I don't think I really knew what recovery was.
02:35I didn't know what that meant, what recovery was supposed to be.
02:40Coming out of something like that at 18 years old, I sort of only knew how to function in
02:46that chaos and in that fear.
02:48It was tied into trying to seek recovery and not knowing what normality looked like.
02:53My family and friends were so incredible, but I thought I had to take on so much of it
02:58by myself.
02:59I'm fine.
03:00Don't worry about me.
03:01It's not a big deal.
03:02You know, and it took about eight years of chaos after the accident to finally kind of
03:08come out of the other side of it, to make some peace and to ask for some help and to
03:14really let a lot of stuff go.
03:16It was really important to me to still keep my scars, not to reduce them or do any sort
03:23of like plastic reconstructive surgery.
03:25It was really important that I continue to wear it on my face.
03:28It was really important that it was my story that you could see and that I could tell.
03:32How I feel today is fucking grateful.
03:37I have a great job and a boyfriend and I'm so close with my mom and my dad and my
03:43friends
03:43and I travel and I'm healthy.
03:46I think I'm just supposed to always hold on to what lies underneath all of that.
03:50And as long as my head hits the pillow and I know that and I have that perspective, then
03:55it was all worth it.
03:56I love my scars because they make me different than everyone else.
