Reconciling the Ill-matched Threads

"She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth-
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration.

where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
 and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you."
~ Rilke's Book of Hours- Love Poems to God

For many years I thought, "I'm not beautiful but I know how to put myself together."  Here I am, 60 years old, covered in scars on the outside and just as many (or maybe even more) on the inside.  Now, I feel like a mess and don't even know how to put myself together. 
I remember the moment I first caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror at the hospital.  My face was an ill-matched patchwork of grafted skin from my scalp all sewn together with black thread.  My scalp was raw and bloody because the scalp, as my doctor explained, is always used for face grafting because it is "blushing skin" which is only found from the neck up and he wanted my graft skin to match the rest of my face as much as possible.  It was a horrific sight straight out of a horror flick! 

In the years since, I've become quite a make-up expert.  I draw on the rest of my missing right eye-brow trying my best to match the left one (symmetry is the goal here.)  I use makeup to blend and conceal and create the illusion of a normal face.  There was a time when I was sure that a large tattoo on the scar tissue of my left upper arm was the perfect fix but I learned that thick scar tissue does not tattoo very well so I dropped that idea.  As time went by, I gave up trying to conceal the scars because there are just too many!

And if that isn't bad enough, I'm discovering that the deepest and most difficult scars are internal- well hidden as it were but hardest to mend.  Several months after the attack , I went to a woman trained in healing by a Shaman.  She performed the ceremony and told me that my heart was broken into hundreds of pieces (no surprise, it sure felt like it!) but she went on to say, "Your heart was broken long before the attack!"  sigh... 

Now I must go back, way back to my own beginnings, and give myself permission to examine the ill-matched  threads of my life.  The broken threads that have long since been forgotten but still limit me from my own becoming.  The loudmouths from the hall (in my head) continue to yell, "You must be perfect!  Stop whining- nobody wants to hear that!  Get it together!" but, it's time to clear the hall for a different celebration- My Life!