I’m ashamed of my scars

I’m 23, almost 24. I have struggled with keloids since I was 14, which is the worst time in the world for a teenage girl to battle irreversible and chronically painful scarring. I have been ashamed of them my entire adolescence to adulthood, and though it hasn’t stopped me from being intimate, there is a part of me that finds it incredibly difficult to be vulnerable around men enough to tell them about my scars and allow them to look.

I would say that I’m pretty. Fairly smart. I have things going for me and I have goals of becoming an attorney and one day a law professor. I say these things because I constantly feel like I have to qualify myself to…myself, I guess? The scars are so emotionally painful for me that they have significantly affected my body image. Though they’re a fairly mild case compared to some. My keloids grow very slowly, but I have a large one on my chest from a failed keloid excision, and keloids on both shoulders and hypertrophic scars on my shoulder blades. I see a dermatologist regularly for kenalog injections.

I’ve been seeing an amazing guy for 3.5 months and have only taken my shirt off once for sex when I was on top and it was dark. I just feel like I’m on the verge of crying every single time I think about telling him about them and showing them to him. I see long term potential with him, but I have it so ingrained in my head that he won’t find me attractive anymore if I let him see what I’m so ashamed of. I just started therapy in January and we haven’t gotten to this yet but I will definitely be bringing it up. It’s been a decade of this and I’m so tired.

My therapist is quite expensive and my life is in a place where I don’t need to see her every week, so in the meantime, **I guess I want to know how I should handle this if we get intimate and he wants me to take my shirt off when the lights are on. I feel like it’s getting increasingly difficult to avoid and I know he knows there’s something off.**