Warning: This post is a very personal experience of cutting and may trigger issues for some readers.
In Australia, 200,000 people harm themselves every month. Many of them are teenagers.
By ANONYMOUS
Every time I come across a story on ‘self-harming’ I am physically sick to my stomach. The mere mention triggers memories of intense feelings of guilt and self-loathing. It is a reminder of my ‘dirty secret’. A secret which is hard to forget when I remove my ‘armour’; my 25 year old scars are hidden by the designer watches and bracelets I adorn myself with.
As I remove my adornments I feel that very same sense of vulnerability come back, thankfully I accept those feelings and I now know how to deal with them differently.
My first memory of self-harming was at around 12 or 13 years of age. I remember feeling a combined sense of comfort and some kind of adrenaline rush, as I would sneak a razor blade or a knife into my bedroom with me – ‘just in case’.
I have always been a person that feels deeply; I have learnt to accept that is very much who I am. Those close to me often refer to me as being ‘passionate’ and there is no doubt that I am passionate; I feel the emotional peaks and troughs of life completely. When I love, I love completely, when I am sad I am really sad, when I am angry I am livid, when I feel guilt and fear I am paralysed by those emotions. And then there is my old companion, which I call ‘the void’ – an overwhelming sense of emptiness and loneliness that feels larger than life.
In my case it was the intensity of those deep emotions that drove me to ‘cut’. I would lock myself away in my room and dig as deep as I could until the stinging sensation would hurt so bad that I couldn’t feel the emotional pain anymore. There were times I felt like I wanted to physically cut the deep, emotional pain out of my own body. Like any addict [and I was most definitely addicted to this self-destructive, vicious cycle] I learnt to become creative. I remember being asked about the cross cut I had on my ankle at the time that I said was my was my attempt to tattoo myself.