Crisanda Benson-Davis 2

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.

Scars change people because pain changes people. It’s an undeniable fact. The minute we are born we are subject to pain, and with each bit of pain we experience, fear is deposited into our person, whether we are aware of this occurrence or not. It is through pain that we learn to be cautious, learn about consequences to certain actions we’d rather not experience.

A good example of this comes from my own childhood, when I was about 10 years old. I was at the pool with a group of friends, and we were playing a game called Chicken. In this game, one person does something, a trick or dive usually, off of the diving board, and the rest of the players have to do the same thing. If they are unwilling or unable to do whatever the leader did, they must cluck like a chicken and flap their arms while running off the board. In other words, unspeakable embarrassment. One of the girls, Tracy, that was playing with us was a few years older than me and she was a rather accomplished diver for her age. She went up when it was her turn and did a perfect back dive into the water. I had never attempted this kind of dive, but I specifically remember I had absolutely no qualms about trying it out. Having never felt the pain of a failed back dive, I had no fear of trying it. I didn’t even hesitate once I was up on the diving board, I simply turned around, bent backwards a bit, and jumped right off. The volume of the slap my back made against the swimming pool water was a pretty good indication of how much it hurt. It was a very loud slap, and the feeling shooting through my body was just short of agony. It hurt so badly that for a moment I wasn’t sure if I would be able to swim to the surface again. I would never attempt something like that again. Even if it wasn’t a back dive. That incident instilled the fear of unknown dives in me. If I’m not completely sure I’ll be able to pull the dive off without hurting myself, I won’t do it. The feeling of having my entire back red with the smack of the water has never left me.
This is how scars measure change. You can see the amount of fear that has seeped into someone’s body by learning about their scars, both accidental and intentional, visible and invisible.

We can see this throughout history when noticing how history is recorded in relation to mass scars. Mass scars are occurrences such as The Oklahoma City Bombing, Columbine, 9/11, and Virginia Tech. They are catastrophes that effected a large number of people, including those that may not have been directly influenced by the event. Humans measure time in catastrophes, or scars. As children we are not taught about happy occurrences, but horrible things: Pearl Harbor, civil rights, and the Vietnam War, just to name a few. People can trace their history and the way their particular people or group has changed, not through their happy, joyful times, but through the times they were persecuted or hurt. We measure time and change through the things we have overcome and the pain we have experience, not in the amount of rainbows we were able to collect.

It was in 6th grade that I met the girl who would become the most scarred person I know. Her name was Lizz and we met in Sunday School. Her hair was several different colors and I was wearing a name tag that was festively decorated with a cornucopia. That’s what we remember about each other from that first day.

It was the summer after freshman year when I found out that Lizz cut herself. We were on a church trip in Tennessee. We’d just gotten to the college dorms we were staying in and the first thing Lizz did was drop her bottle of Jones soda. It shattered and the floor was sprinkled with broken glass and green liquid. It was then that Lizz chose to tell me about her cutting. She had done it mostly in middle school. We’d gone to the same middle school and been in Confirmation together every Wednesday night, but I’d no idea how depressed she was. She always seemed pretty happy. But she was suicidal the entire time.

The next summer we went on a mission trip to Washington D.C. It was there in the basement of the church we were staying in that Lizz told me about her suicide attempt. She’d overdosed on some pill– she never told me which – and mixed it with alcohol. By all logical standards, it should have killed her. But for some reason it didn’t. Since that night she had trouble swallowing pills, even if it was just for a headache.

Her first tattoo appeared during our junior year of high school on her right shoulder; the word "justice" in Greek. After that things started snowballing. She had an "XO" tattooed on her left wrist in honor of the musician Elliot Smith when he died. Then the bats appeared on her collar bone, and after that a drawing from Woodie Guthrie’s sketchbook that stood for anti-censorship. Lizz’s family is one of the most cancer prone families in America. Growing up, she routinely flew to D.C. to see a specialist. They found the first bit of melanoma senior year on her left shoulder, right next to her Guthrie tattoo. The two of us were sitting on the floor of the art gallery at school when she told me about the cancer. She was explaining to me how she was thinking of setting up her senior art show and slipped the information in casually. She had more cancer removed from her right thigh in April.
Lizz is an interesting case, but it is important to point out that none of her tattoos were memorials or remembrances of particularly painful episodes in her life, the way her cutting and cancer scars were, and so she does not illustrate my case with tattoos as scars very well, but I have a couple of other friends who do, and coincidently, not only do they possess tattoo scars, but they themselves are scars in my life. They have caused me a great deal of pain and that pain changed me.
The night before leaving for college, my friend Jade and I hung out at her house. After watching a movie we went downstairs to get something to eat and ended up staying down there for the rest of the night, just talking. Jade is one of the biggest scars in my life. She’s changed me more than almost anyone else in my life just by changing herself. She changed so completely between our freshman and senior years in high school that there was a period in our junior year when I couldn’t stand to be around her at all. I just wanted to scream at her every time she came into the room. In my eyes she had been lying to me about who she really was throughout our three years of friendship. When I met Jade she was this innocent little blonde haired girl who swore she was never going to drink or smoke or doing anything like that. Well, she changed. And it all happened pretty quickly.
In our junior year Jade moved out of her childhood home. This doesn’t sound like too big of a deal, but it was the only home she had ever known, so when she and her mom had to leave it, it sent her world spinning into oblivion. She started doing things she would never normally have done. All of this completely threw me off. All of this did cause me to change, but not in the way that I thought it was going to. I figured there was no way we were ever going to remain friends unless I too changed into what Jade had become. But I didn’t want to change into that. I’m not trying to sound high and mighty or holier-than-thou, but I really just didn’t have any desire to drink or smoke or do drugs. If I had, I’m sure I would’ve just started doing all those things, and everything would’ve been fine again. But I didn’t, so I had to figure something else out.

Instead I figured out a way to just be fine with all of it. I decided to love this new Jade too. It was a pretty simple solution on paper, but I still felt as if she’d been dishonest with me. After awhile, though I figured out that she hadn’t been lying to me. People just change. It’s completely normal and just because they turn into someone else that doesn’t mean they weren’t who they appeared to be before.
There’s another scar that Jade has that affected me even more deeply than the sudden 180 degree turn she pulled on me. It’s a tattoo on the inside of her right arm just above the wrist. Since I don’t have any tattoos myself, this is the only one that I really feel connected to at all.

This is what Jade and I were talking about in her kitchen the night before we left for college. This scar she had inked into her arm. It’s a simple tattoo. It says "Clarissa" in black script. Jade didn’t want to have to explain this tattoo to all the new people she was going to be meeting in college. This tattoo sums up the largest scar in my life so far.

Every time I start to tell this story, I wonder how many times I’m going to tell it. It is so firmly ingrained in my brain and in my heart that it somehow creeps into every piece I’ve ever written. This is the story of a group scar. It’s different from a personal scar. It is one that you share with many people. It’s not quite a mass scar, like Columbine or Virginia Tech, but it effects more than just a couple of people. This group scar is particularly deep in me. It was the first time I ever really experienced loss and ripping, tearing sadness. It was the first time I’d ever heard someone cry as if their soul were being ripped in two. It was Jade I heard cry like that.

Jade and I have a mutual friend, Jessi. She gave Jade one of her biggest scars.
Jessi and I didn’t really stalk people. We just didn’t have anything to do after school sometimes. It was more just hanging out, but we would get hamburgers from Sonic and sit outside of Brenden’s house in her giant, red SUV. Sometimes we’d play I Spy. Sometimes we’d just listen to music. It didn’t really matter. We’d talk for a couple hours and then Jessi would drive me home in time for dinner. I waste a lot of time. So does Jessi. We figured we might as well waste it together.

We took to stalking a boy named Tim when we got bored with Brenden. He was this guy that Jade met at the mock DUI the school sponsored every year the week before prom to scare us into not drinking and driving. He was skinny. And hung out in the art hallway with the other kids who smoked cigarettes for lunch instead of eating food. He had a faux-hawk. And a leather jacket. And he wore girl’s jeans. Jade thought he was attractive. Jessi knew that Jade had decided to go after Tim and, sensing her time to stab Jade in the back had come, went after him as well.

Jade did get Tim. So did Jessi.

Jade lost her virginity on James McAllister’s– a boy in our grade – bathroom floor. Tim went down on her right there on the bathroom mat. He didn’t tell her that he was also screwing Jessi. And Jessi didn’t tell her either.

I said early on in this essay that I changed when I was diagnosed with diabetes. But, I’m sitting here really thinking about it for the first time in months, and the truth is, I’d like to be able to say I changed, that I became who I needed to in order to survival, but that’s not what happened. Almost immediately after I was diagnosed in 5th grade, I began to resist the change I was supposed to be making.
See, I was supposed to be checking my blood sugar four times a day, taking a shot of insulin every time I ate. I wasn’t doing that. Not as often as I should have been, anyway.

In order to be a good diabetes manager, you have to be slightly suicidal. Anyone who has ever given themselves a shot has to be. When I was diagnosed the doctors gave me what they called a rocket. It was a little device that you inserted a syringe into, and once it was cocked, if you pressed the button on the side, it shot the syringe into your skin so you didn’t actually have to press the needle into yourself. I was diagnosed in April and in June my mother decided to send me to a Diabetic Camp. This entire week was one of the most emotionally scarring experiences of my life, but there was one incident in particular that topped the others. We were informed in the weeks preceding camp that I would not have to take any of my diabetic supplies because the camp would provide everything that I needed. What I didn’t know, though, was that diabetics who had the disease for more than a couple of months did not use a rocket when taking shots. So, when I got camp and found this out, I was faced with the realization that I would have to give myself the shots. I would have to physically push the needle into myself.

Getting a shot is no fun. It hurts a little, and just the thought of a very sharp, albeit small, piece of metal entering your body is no fun. Giving a shot is no fun either. Most people don’t enjoy inflicting pain on others, so stabbing them with said piece of metal is not exactly a treat. But doing both – being on both sides of the needle – is downright traumatic.

I sat on my bunk for a good half hour trying to work up the courage to give myself a shot. I finally did it, and I think that’s when I stopped trying to change. My logic may be pretty fucked up, but here’s the way I see it. There is something wrong with me either way I go. If I don’t take care of myself, I’m slightly suicidal. If I stab myself with needles everyday for the rest of my life I’m slightly suicidal too. And I think that anyone who believes that something inside you literally has to break before you can put yourself on both sides of the needle at the same time, is just being ignorant. This presents a completely new situation, and that is of someone who scars themselves intentionally but without really having a choice in the matter. Either way I turn, the problem is the same. I have to kill myself a little bit everyday in order to stay alive. Not only does this make no sense, but I really have no way of knowing if it’s going to work. I have so many medical problems because of my diabetes that any number of things could kill me. And so I have not changed. I do the bare minimum to get by, to keep breathing, to make sure I wake up the next morning. And it is killing me, and not exactly slowly. If I don’t "change my ways" – as my mother has said so many times while trying to threaten me into reform – it will lead to irreversible complications with my heart, my kidneys, my limbs, my eyes, and the list goes on and on and on. It’s just, I have a huge problem with someone asking me to hurt myself everyday in order to stay alive. What kind of life is that? It isn’t one at all. It’s one that I refuse to live anyway. My stand on this whole diabetic thing has been the same for many years. I shouldn’t have to do this. No one should.

Somewhere in my high school career my mother decided that I was in denial about my diabetes. Apparently, I refused to believe that I had it. Well, that was never the problem. I was well aware that I had it. That was more the problem, I guess. I was too aware that I had it. I couldn’t escape it, or even have a small vacation. I had to deal with it every day. Forever. And the thought of that injustice pissed me off so much that I just wanted to quit no matter the consequences, come what may. I tried explaining this to my mother, but she rarely hears what I say about my diabetes, especially when I’m yelling, which I probably was. So I had to go to therapy, to a shrink, a psychologist, whatever the hell you want to call it. I sat in a room and could think of nothing to say to this woman who had no fucking idea what the hell I was experiencing. I would just sit there, facing the windows and watching the crane outside that was slowing revamping the hospital. I prayed that the crane would come crashing through the windows just to give me something to talk about. What we learned, from these oh-so-helpful sessions was that Mother was as much the problem as I was. Oh well spotted, Mrs. I-went-to-college-for-this. I could have told her that years ago. You see, my mother’s approach to motivating me to caring more about taking care of myself was the utilization of death threats. She wouldn’t threaten to kill me, but she would tell me about how I was killing myself. All of this was true of course, but it was obviously not the way to go. You’d think she would’ve realized this after having the same death threat conversation with me and seeing absolutely no change in my behavior.

What this has to do with anything, I don’t know. These are just my scars and sometimes it’s nice to rant about the things that have caused you pain.
If anyone can measure change by scars, it’s Harry Potter. His life changed very drastically on the night that Voldemort murdered his parents and then attempted to murder Harry as well, but the when the spell back fired, only received his lightning-bolt shaped scar. Granted, Harry is a fictional character, but he has also been one of the steady presences in my life. As my parents got divorced and then my brother moved out, it seemed like everyone important was dropping out of my life. Harry was my escape from the world, and now that I look back on it, he may be the reason I became so interested and fixated on scars. I began reading the Harry Potter books by accident. I received the first one for my 10th birthday along with a book called Ghost Canoe, and they sat on top of my dresser for several months before I even picked them up out of boredom. Don’t get me wrong, I loved reading as a child. I just thought that both of the books looked incredibly stupid. I took both the books to my mother and asked her which one she thought I should read. She chose Harry Potter, but after studying the cover for a minute or two I threw it aside and picked up Ghost Canoe. I spent about 10 minutes reading Ghost Canoe before I wanted to kill myself. And so I picked Harry Potter up again. I sat down on the floor in front of my book shelf and completely lost track of the time. I spent all afternoon reading Harry Potter. I fell in love with it immediately By that evening I had become a devoted reader. Harry’s world gave me a place to escape to, especially every night when my parents would spend the evening yelling at my brother who was refusing to do anything in school, no matter how much they yelled. The Harry Potter books have been a huge influence on my life. Harry’s scar is a perfect example of what I’m trying to get across. It marks a time of great pain and change in Harry’s life. It stands on his forehead as a lasting reminder of that time in his life, and of the time I’ve spent with Harry in my life.

It is also important to mention that people do not always like scars as much as I do. Many people do all that they can to remove their scars, peel them from their bodies. They do not want that constant reminder of pain staring them in the face every time they look in the mirror or see it on their body. Sometimes the scar makes the pain too vivid and it is almost like living through the pain all over again. There are many ways of removing scars, as this article talks about. There is surgical scar revision, dermabrasion, laser resurfacing, soft tissue fillers that can be injected to kind of fill in the scar, punch graffs, and chemical peels. All these methods have been discovered because people so hated their scars. Especially large scars in the facial region can make a person feel very unattractive, so it is understandable why they don’t want it there. But they are in a sense, erasing their history. Once the scar is gone there is no longer proof of pain or change. People don’t always like who they’ve become, and especially the way that they got to where they are. So by removing their scars, they can pretend those particular incidents never happened.