Learning to Love You More

The Learning to Love You More site encourages people to get out and interact with the world and make connections with people. It challenges the shy to be bold and the lazy to be more inquisitive. Family relationships and communication skills can be worked on, society and culture rediscovered...but we have to be the ones to make the effort and the website gives us the place to share our discoveries with others. Classrooms in schools are doing the posted assignments and group posting their results to the point where the poor one person tech dept at the site had to kindly ask them to refrain and publish their results in a different manner. What a great problem to have, too many people exploring, discovering and wanting to engage and share their experiences with others. Connections are becoming seemingly easier with today's plethora of technology, but because it is so much more available I find myself communicating less and less due to sensory overload and a desire to withdraw and retreat. Sites like this one encourage me to reconnect in a fun way and share something from myself with others.

I was introduced to this site last semester in Media Archeology and found the assignments intriguing, but never actually did any of them. Today I have decided to actually do one of the assignments and post the result here.

Assignment #11: Photograph a scar and write about it.

I have a few interesting scars, but this one on my left arm is the most noticeable and noteworthy. As a child I had a raised mole on my arm that my parents thought was ugly. They always felt that I was ugly in general and so anything they could do to "help" my appearance they did. This beautiful small perfect mole plagued them to the point of bringing me in for removal surgery. It would have been better to leave well enough alone, because the doctor didn't fully get the entire mole under the surface and it grew back 1000 times uglier than it ever was originally. About 2 years later I was back to the doctor, but this time for more invasive surgery to make sure they got it all. I felt like I was having a tumor removed (interestingly enough I had my eigth grade innoculations and my ears pierced besides this surgery all on the same day--talk about glutton for punishment) it hurt so bad. After the doctor was convinced she got it all she had to suture my arm with three layers of stitches because of its location and how deep she had to cut into my arm. She promised me that it would heal nicely, but instead I gained what I can only refer to as my "cat's eye" scar. It is shaped just like a large cat's eye and even has a stretched out freckle in it to add to the eyeball effect. The moral of this story is leave well enough alone and stop being so concerned about appearances to the point of making matters worse than they were to begin with.

I leave you with these two images to bring home my point.

A normal looking young man

What is it?