Crisanda Benton-Davis

"Scars: The Tape Measure of Change"


Here’s the problem. We all grow up into what we hate. No one is ever really satisfied with who they are. Have you ever met someone who was completely content in who they were? People are always trying to change themselves into something they can at least stand to be around. People are constantly trying to loose weight, going out of their way to reach what society considers to be an acceptable weight. They’ll do anything. Pilates, yoga, or ridiculous diets. They get tattoos and piercings to change their appearances, and some go to even greater lengths and get plastic surgery. Others take less drastic routes and merely get their hair cut or dyed a different color. The problem is, we hate ourselves and growing up, getting all these opportunities to become who we actually want to be, seems to just be giving us more ways of getting to where we don’t want to be. Why can’t people just become what they want to be? Why must life be this constant struggle with ourselves? And why are we so scared of change? Is it just that we’re afraid we won’t be able to change sufficiently or that we still won’t like who we are when we’ve changed? Is it all for nothing?

Robert Frost baffles me. As a fellow poet, I have no idea how he finds so many things to write about leaves and trees and gook. But it is from one of his most famous poems that I find my audience for this piece. In his "Road Not Taken," Frost begins the poem with this line: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. This is really for people who are diverging, or who are being pulled in two different directions and have a choice as to which way to go in their life. This is for anyone who has ever made a choice that changed their lives. But especially this is for people who are in the current process of diverging, stretching their legs as far apart as they can to stay on both of the paths at once and finding they really do have to choose.
I have often been one who is diverging. People are faced with life changing situations and find they must diverge and change or die.

I missed Columbine. I had no idea that it had even occurred until many months later, and for the longest time I couldn’t figure out how I had missed something like that. I came to the conclusion that I must be pretty self involved. It wasn’t until years later that I put the pieces together and realized why I had so blatantly ignored one of the most devastating school shootings in history. Columbine happened to fall on the day that I experience my own tragedy. On April 20, 1999, the same day as Columbine, I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I had to change or die. If I didn’t learn how to give myself insulin and check my blood sugar there was no way I was going to survive.

People all over the world deal with these kinds of decisions every day. People do not like to change. They only do it as a means of survival. I learned this early on. People will resist change at every turn and bend their entire will upon not having to do it. As soon as they get comfortable in their current state and way of life, something happens, like getting diabetes, and they are faced with an ultimatum. It is horribly annoying. People think they hate change, but in my hatred of it I find an inherent love of change. Change is the only thing that saves us from our own mundane lives. I would be bored silly if I wasn’t constantly being faced with the need for change, to shift and adapt and find new ways of surviving.

This is just something for those people to think about. Something to make them question whether or not change is really the enemy. I want to show these Divergers that it isn’t the act of change that is the problem. It’s actually a solution to pain and the way in which we survive. Without change I would be nothing more than a stick in the mud. This is for those restless people in the world who want a change in their lives but have no idea how they want to change. Change has the bad habit of sneaking up on people. And ironically, change is one of the few things in life that is constant. I can be sure that I will continue to change as long as I live. And so in my loathing of change, I have come to love it because it is what I crave: something to depend on, something that will always be there no matter what else happens. I will always be changing

My father has always called me Pookie. God knows why, but it has been one of the few constants in my life, one thing that I am sure will never change. But, then again, I’m also sure that change is a constant in my life. Things will always be slipping and sliding around. To hold still, to give up, is to die. I can depend on change as much as I can depend on the fact that my father will call me Pookie until the day he dies. When my family moved from Nebraska to Kansas, he called me Pookie. When he and my mother got divorced, he called me Pookie. When he moved four hours away from my brother and I and only called once a week, he still called me Pookie every time I picked up the phone.

My brother, Colin, and I spent the summers with my father after he moved to Beloit, Kansas to be the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. That’s where I changed most drastically before coming to college. You see, my father is a horrible parent. He let my brother and I run wild in this little town. By the age of 14 I didn’t have a curfew. Colin and I could go wherever and do whatever we pleased. There were very few constants in my life during those golden summers. One of the few constants was my stars. I begged my father to buy them for me from Dollar General, and as soon as we got home I dragged him to my bedroom to help me stick them all over the ceiling. The stars were always there when I finally climbed into bed at night. I never knew which of my brother’s friends I’d find sleeping on the couch in the morning, or what I’d be able to find in the fridge for breakfast or whose house I’d end up in by lunchtime, but I always had my stars. At least I had them for 6 years.

The stars started falling sometime the summer before my freshman year in high school. I was half asleep when the first one lost its grip on my ceiling and smacked me right in the face. It scared the shit out of me. I was just floating in that place between asleep and awake when it hit me and jarred me from what could have been a peaceful night’s sleep. After that, though, it turned out to be just another sleepless night. And that is what I am. I am just the product of too many sleepless nights, which led to too many self portraits, too few of which were any good. That and scavenging the kitchen for food and never finding what I want. It’s because of those nights that I know. I know what my food is. Everyone has that one food they always crave but can never figure out what the food actually is. Well, I solved the great mystery of my appetite. It’s always Rice Krispie Treats. And through all those sweaty summer nights the stars kept falling. It took many summers. Many nights of 3 am Acapulcoan cliff diving on TV and watching the moths collect around the bare light bulb on the back porch. I grew up subtlety and changed silently.

How do I even know that I changed? Can you measure change? Of course. It is measured in the number of tattoos someone has, or the number of piercings. It is measured in how many pounds they lost that month, or how many days a week they make it to the gym. Or it can be measured in by the inches the cut off their hair, or the number of the hair dye they used It can be measure in the years it takes for all the stars to fall off of a child’s bedroom ceiling.

Another way someone might measure change is by events that were particularly painful. I believe you can measure change by the scars a person collects throughout their life. Scars tell stories and you can count them as easily as anything else. I also think that tattoos can sometimes be considered scars. Especially if the person got the tattoo in remembrance of something especially painful that they experienced in their life. Change is measured in pain. And the tangible evidence of pain are scars and sometimes tattoos. Not all pain leaves scars or is immortalized in a tattoo, I realize this, but it is a start in the measurement of change a person has gone through in his or her life.

I got my first scar when I was three years old. Not too bad. I have to give my mother props for keeping out of lasting danger for three whole years before I got away from her. I was in gymnastics and I had to wear a leotard. I absolutely loathe leotards. They look ridiculous for one, and they’re a bitch to get off. Especially when you’re three years old. One day during gymnastics practice I had to go to the bathroom. When I got into the bathroom though, I couldn’t get the fucking leotard off. Keep in mind I’m three years old, now. I can’t get the damn thing off, so I end up peeing my leotard. Then, somehow, I manage to slip in my own pee and crack my chin open on the tile. I come out of the bathroom screaming bloody murder, completely covered in piss and blood, and I’m sure I gave my mother a heart attack on the spot. It was years before she let me go to the bathroom on my own again. I had to get stitches and of course this resulted in a nice stitch shaped scar.
The next scar of importance that I received wasn’t really my fault. Really. I was nine years old and it was the 4th of July. My dad told me to hold the Roman Candle. Then he lit it. I was wearing my Pocahontas sandals that day. I loved those things. I knew something was wrong almost immediately. The wind was blowing the sparks that the Roman Candle was spitting back at me, in my face, all over me. One of the little buggers managed to wriggle its way under the strap of my awesome sandal. The right one. Right on the ankle. It burned a pretty nice little hole into my skin before I managed to pry that damn sandal off my foot. Dad apologized. Dumbass. No, really, you’re supposed to hold the Roman Candle. Maybe that’s when I stopped trusting my father.

The next scar was entirely my fault. My brother and I were spending a week with my aunt and uncle during the summer when I was about 11 years old. Uncle Vic has a motorcycle and he took me for a ride on it. I didn’t jump off or anything psycho crazy like that. I was climbing off when the ride was over and hit my leg against the tail pipe thing. It was hot. 2nd degree burn hot to be exact. But here’s the kicker, as a child I hate going to anyone but my mother when I was injured, so I didn’t tell anyone about the burn until the next day. My bad. Probably should’ve gotten it checked out before then. We went to a fair that evening and my aunt actually got mad at me for not wanting to go on any of the rides. Granted she didn’t know it was because I was in so much pain I could barely stand, but once she found out, she felt pretty bad about that one.

I blame my next scar on the stairs, because honestly, if I hadn’t tripped on them I wouldn’t have cracked my head open. This one takes a little explanation as to why I was running around my house at night in the middle of winter wearing nothing on my upper half but my bra. It was brother’s fault. My parents had gone to church that evening, leaving Colin and I at home alone. Bad things always happened when they left us by ourselves. We were bored, so Colin dared me to run around the house in just my bra. I was 12 so it was really more of a sports bra. No big deal really. Anyway, when people dare me to do something, I just can’t resist. That’s how I ended up drinking half a bottle of ketchup, but that has nothing to do with this other than it was a dare, which is the point I was trying to make in the first place, so, moving on...That’s how I came to be running around my house in just my bra at night in winter. It was the last stair too.

Everything slowed down to that really trippy, oh shit slow motion, and I actually had time to think, as I was hurtling toward the pavement head first, "Oh fuck." Then I hit and there was a giant flash of light and I thought I might be okay. I started screaming for my brother, who upon reaching me informed me that I wasn’t bleeding, but he was standing on the wrong side of me. After we discovered the bleeding, we fucked around for a bit trying to figure out what the hell to do, and ended up calling 911 even though the hospital is right across the street from our house.
That’s the only time I’ve ever ridden in an ambulance. It was only for 2 blocks though, so I feel kind of jipped. They could have at least taken me for a spin before dropping me at the ER. There are probably rules about that though. I had to get stitches for that one too, on the skin underneath my right eyebrow. It’s quite a conversation piece.

My last and most recent scar come from just last summer. This one was all me. I won’t even try to get out of it. I volunteer at this camp for a week during the summer, and at said camp there is a golf cart. The staff uses it to transport heavy objects or gym equipment, or to just get someplace if they are in a hurry. The younger staff also uses it for other reasons that the older staff members are not aware of. Sometimes we take it off roading on the trails in the woods, or just drive it recklessly and stupidly. It was the last day of camp and my friend Lynda was driving while I was sitting in the passenger seat. She said "Jump" so I did. Ouch. Gravel road. Amazingly I landed on my left side and did a sort of backward somersault and jumped right back up, sustaining only minor injuries to my left arm, in particular, my elbow. Looking back on this particular decision, I see now that I had actual reasoning behind it. At the time that this all went down I was in a state of fear. Totally and completely petrifying fear. I was scared all the time. Of growing up and moving out and going to college. I had never been so scared for such a long period of time. I was sick and tired of being scared, so I jumped, and I wasn’t scared to, at least for a little bit. Fuck. I jumped out of a moving golf cart onto a gravel road...college couldn’t hurt that much.

But it isn’t just our own scars that we must take into account to measure the change experienced in life. When someone I’m close to experiences pain, it hurts and affects me too, obviously.

Colin and I would also visit my father during our winter breaks from school sometimes. One year we were doing this and playing over at our friends’ house, where they have a playhouse. It was two stories tall with a ladder that lead up to this balcony and upper room. One of our favorite games to play was Ultimate Dodgeball. Two of us would stand up on the balcony and throw balls at the other two who were on the driveway below. On this particular occasion, my brother was up in the balcony and I was on the driveway. I darted underneath the balcony and as I did Colin leaned forward and launched a ball that nailed me right in the back. I was pissed off that he’d hit me, of course, so I turned around to yell some curse word at him. For a moment I thought he was just leaning over the railing. But as I stared, more of his body was slowly appearing before my eyes. He was falling, off of a balcony, right there in front of me. Even before I really realized what was happening, the scene had slowed itself into slow motion, as if begging me to pay close attention to every detail. As he hit the pavement the speed picked back up and he crumpled onto the ground, his left arm breaking most of the fall.

I can still see Colin’s green watch cutting into his swollen wrist and hear the lump in his throat as he begged us to help him take it off. I can see my father, calm and sluggish in a sea of chaos as he drove Colin to the hospital. I can picture long hospital room with two beds and no curtains.

Often, the things that stick with you are the ones that change you, even if it’s just a strange clump of seemingly unrelated details. If Colin’s broken arm didn’t change me, there isn’t much that could. Each scar brings with it a little bit of fear. The racing heart and sweaty palms. The stomach clenched in sudden worry. I have many vicarious scars. Other people’s scars have made more of an impact on my life and the way I think than my own have. I’ve learned to carefully consider my actions when other people’s well beings are involved. Scars bring cautiousness and responsibility.

Sometimes I still slip up, though.

My friend Kathy will be getting a new scar tomorrow because she jumped off a ledge today. It’s partly my fault. It was me who threw the flip-flop up there in the first place. I mean, it’s true, Gloria was the one who stole it from Liesl, but then she gave it to me and I threw it up on the ledge outside of Post 3. Every time we passed we’d talk about getting it down. This went on for a few days. And then today after lunch, we decided to take action. First we tried to give Kathy a boost up to the ledge. That didn’t work. Gloria and I couldn’t get her high enough. Next we tried using one of the patio chairs. It still wasn’t high enough though. Luckily, the stairwells have these really handy windows and Kathy was able to climb out of one of them. She started having second thoughts as soon as she was out on the ledge. She threw the flip-flop down to us and then began to ready herself for the descent. I suggested a hang-and-drop but Kathy didn’t think she’d be able to hold herself. Instead, she sat down and scooted off. It was over in a matter of seconds. Her whole body arched backward and then snapped forward and she landed on all fours, more or less, smacking her right knee against the sidewalk. As soon as she hit I could tell things weren’t right. Her knee just looked weird. The knee cap was sticking out in all the wrong places. Gloria and I both instinctively grabbed her to hold her still as she rolled onto her back. She was clutching her knee and she was obviously in pain, although she was quickly going into shock. I immediately pulled out my cell phone and called 911. The ambulance was there in a matter of minutes and my friends and I spent the day in the ER waiting room with CNN’s redundant report on the Virginia Tech massacre pounding down on us incessantly. It turned out that Kathy had shattered her knee cap and torn the tendon as well. She has to have surgery on it tomorrow morning.

When we finally got back on campus tonight at about 9 pm, Gloria made an interesting comment as we drew nearer to where Kathy had landed that afternoon. “I know it’s stupid,” she said to me, “but I keep expecting to see the outline of a body where Kathy was laying.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to find a tiny Kathy-shaped scar somewhere on my body, because Kathy changed me.