When Alyssa McDonald was just 2 years old, she suffered a household accident that caused severe burns to her face. She was rushed to the hospital and remained in a coma for two weeks. Her family even heard that she probably would not survive.
But Alyssa pulled through. The burns left visible scars that would accompany her throughout her life and forced her to spend much of her childhood in hospitals and undergoing treatments.
The most difficult moment came when she began interacting with other children. At school, some classmates reacted cruelly when they saw her. “How disgusting, look at her face”, they would say. They also called her a “monster”, and some even ran away when they encountered her.
For years, she had to learn to live with the stares and comments. However, over time she began to understand that trying to hide would not change who she was. “I’ll never fit in. I’ll never be able to hide among people”, she recalls thinking when she was 13.
Instead of hiding her face, she decided to turn it into a statement. “Are you looking at me? Let me give you a show”, she says. She also began describing herself as “a Picasso with legs”, a way of explaining that her scars did not make her any less valuable or beautiful.
Her philosophy eventually came down to one phrase: “I wear my flaws like diamonds”. For Alyssa, the marks that once prompted ridicule ultimately became part of her identity that she no longer wants to hide.
“There was only one perfect person, and they killed her”, she says. Her story, published by Love What Matters, is not about erasing her scars, but about learning to see them differently: as something that is part of her and that she does not need to apologize for.