The scar isn’t the story. What you did with your hands after is.

A mark on the body is only the record of one moment. What it comes to mean gets decided later, by whatever you went on to do with the hand, the leg, the year. People will ask about the visible part because it is visible, and the visible part is almost never the interesting one.

If something left a mark on you, pay attention to what you have built since rather than to the moment it happened. Pick one thing you can do now that came out of the recovery. When someone asks, you are allowed to answer briefly and spend the conversation on the rest.