TRIGGER WARNING: cutting, self-harm
Usually when I sit down to write, I don’t really know what will come out… Even though I have certain thoughts, maybe even an idea about describing a certain event, a long-forgotten story, these don’t necessarily really come out when I start. So now I don’t know… All I do know is that I need to get something off my chest, but I don’t know what it is. I need a moment. I need darkness and quiet. I need it to be silent…
Maybe this one is about the cutting. The self-harm.
I don’t really know when or how I started doing this. It was in a time when I had never heard about this type of thing and had no idea that this was actually something “people did”… I just know that one night, sitting in my bedroom in my parents’ home, door closed but never locked, lights off and candles lit, music playing, possibly in my headphones so as not to stir a fuss, I started cutting myself.
I used to play with candles a lot. I would light them and watch them melt. I would guide them to melt in beautiful shapes. I would watch the little wax tears and lead them down the right path, so they would form these huge heaps of teared-up wax around the glass bottles that served as candle holders. And ever so often I would let the candle drip on my hands. Watch the wax slide down and freeze… I liked the feeling of hot wax on my skin. And I liked the feeling of the flame brushing through my fingers. So soft and warm and reassuring — you can be sure, fire will burn you. So yeah, I liked playing with fire…
I burned myself with cigarettes already before the cutting started. Always on the same spot, on the outside of my hand, below the left thumb. I wouldn’t extinguish the cigarette on my hand, I would rather hold the cigarette butt just right on the skin and let it burn slowly… I did this in front of my boyfriend a couple of times. I am quite sure several of my friends had seen me do this. I don’t remember what they said or thought, probably something along the lines of “you’re crazy”. It meant nothing to me. I was crazy. That much I knew. And I sure knew how to pick my friends. None of them gave a second thought about all this and that’s probably because they were all just as fucked up as I was.
…But in my eyes, they were tools of freedom. Tools for tiny, minimal, elemental escapes.
But the cutting was something else altogether. The cutting was personal. It was a ritual. With music and candles and sometimes whiskey, or brandy, or whatever would come in handy (meaning whatever I could steal unnoticed from my parent’s cave). I don’t know exactly where I got my first razor from. They were just lying around our home. For utilitarian purposes, of course! But in my eyes, they were tools of freedom. Tools for tiny, minimal, elemental escapes. Maybe I couldn’t go away, but my blood sure could. What a funny thought to make right now… Is this why I was cutting? Literally trying to break out o my skin? Trying to break free? Maybe…
So there I was sitting, back with the candles and music and whiskey and my precious razor. I would first disinfect it very carefully. With fire, of course. I am pretty sure I spent a long while staring at it. How it shined under the candle light. So sharp and defined. So hard and cold. Just the opposite of hot wax. The opposite of me. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much. It was the opposite of me. And then I would carve patterns on my skin. Usually the upper arm. Above the sleeve line so noone would see. I would carve his initials. I would carve the pain. And once I just carved angry slices of frustration, disordered and really just quite mad… I found the sight of blood extremely beautiful. So dark and red and vital. So alive. Warm… The ruby colour and the shine of it. Its density… Sometimes I would cut just so that I could use the blood to colour the drawings in my notebook. But quickly the blood would lose its beautiful colour, its strength. It would simply die and be nothing but a dark smudge. Reduced… When I was done, I would disinfect the razor once again and tuck it carefully back where it belonged. I would get up and go to the bathroom and tend to the wound, rinsing it with pure alcohol. I did not want to get an infection. I actually did not want to get hurt! Isn’t this ironic? And then I would go back to my room in relief and just continue where I’d left off, with the music and the candles and all the paraphernalia.
Sometimes I would need to cut but I did not have a razor. I would use scissors; pins; anything really… I once used a sea shell. It was the time when I was visiting a boyfriend in his house by the sea. He had a roommate and the roommate’s parents decided to show up unexpectedly one morning, knocking on the door. And I was the only one home. Thinking it was another common friend, I opened the door cheerfully — only to get the cold shower of seeing a set of Parents standing at the other side of the door. The feeling was mutual. They were passing through town, wanted to surprise their son, and at the door they expected to see him, they expected to happily surprise him. Instead they got me — a strange, bleary-eyed, hangover girl on an early Monday morning, staring right back at them in shock. Why in shock, you would ask? Well, on one side, I didn’t like Parents. Not just my parents, any parents, in general. But what I was fretting, the reason why my smile froze on the spot, was rather the knowledge of the sad state of affairs inside my friends’ home. What an a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e mess that place was. I had arrived the night before and I had found it a touch disturbing myself. And mind you, I was not the least bit annoyed by the half-smoked joints extinguished on every ashtray in the house. Nor did the heaps of weed all over the place bother me at all. The empty bottles of alcohol… But now suddenly, I had to explain all THAT to The Parents. No, I was not that cool. So I stood in front of the door, blocking the view, as I told them that their son had already headed to university for his classes; yep! rose early, got fresh and ready and off he was! I thought that would make them happy. Did I see a hint of satisfaction in their faces? “All right now, off you go”, I thought. But no, they wanted to get in. Damn! How could I ever stop them? Heck, they were probably paying for the damned place… So, in they got… Took one look around the house and their expression changed quickly back to shock, as they took in the state of the living room and kitchen and observed me, casually trying to collect bags of weed from around the place, overflowing ashtrays from the tables and empty beer bottles from the floor. Oh yeah, notice they did. And their expressions turned gloomier by the minute.
We actually sat down, in the living room, uncomfortably staring at each other, for quite a while. Every now and then The Parents would glance around and their eyes would wander towards the kitchen table, the sink, the floors…. I was following their stares as they discovered more and more little corners of disaster…. It felt like hours, but I truly have no idea what we could have possibly been talking about to fill the dreadfully slowly passing time. It couldn’t have been that long. It was maybe half an hour before they decided they had seen enough and they’d better not wait for their son’s return any longer. Oh, the relief! Once they were out the door, I tried in panic to get in touch with my friends and let them know. Boy, did they have it coming, I thought… They were in deep trouble! But then I thought, FUCK! no, I had it coming! I was in trouble! What did I do? Why did I open the door?
This was exactly his first question, as soon as The Parent’s Son finally returned home from university that same afternoon, and I told him what had happened. “Why the fuck did you let them in? Why did you even answer the door? What the fuck were you thinking?” I tried in vain to explain that the only reason I opened the door in the first place was because I thought it was our other friend that was knocking, who had just left and was indeed known to forget things and come back to ring again. “I am so sorry”, I said, “I thought it was him and just opened up, without second thought”. Look, I was not exactly a “sociable” person. Anyone who knew me, knew that I was definitely not the one running to open the door every time it rang. Especially not the door to someone else’s home. But so it happened. And he was not very happy with the answer. In fact, he was furious. At me. He was shouting at me and I felt smaller and smaller with every word. “How could you do this?” He would shout… But you know what? I am so good at putting blame on myself, that I didn’t even need someone else to confirm that I had fucked up. Of course I fucked up. Of course it was my fault that my friend’s parents showed up unexpectedly on his door step early on a Monday morning. Of course I am a complete idiot for answering the door when it rang. I mean, really, who does that?
Nevermind. There is no logic in my sense of guilt and self-loathing, I won’t even try to explain it. My friend later confessed that he did have a hint that his parents might indeed show up that morning. But he hadn’t told me. So maybe he should have saved some of this guilt-trip for himself. Nevertheless… only thing I knew at that time was despair. I was so devastated by what had happened and by our friend’s reaction that I just turned around, opened the door and ran away. I ran to the beach and sat down and cried and cried. And then I looked for the sharpest sea shell I could find and pushed it through my skin and cut myself. It was not easy with this damned little thing. It was not really sharp. It was not clean. But it was possible and it was all I had… So I pushed hard through the skin and I cut as much as I could, and then pushed some more and cut some more, and then cried some more, and then maybe even cut some more. Little-little cuts… I don’t know. I spent hours on that beach. At some point someone came by and asked if I was ok. I said I’m ok. They left… I kept that sea shell in my pocket, for a long time after that day.
I speak in the past tense. This was all so long ago. But I am not being honest. The truth is that recently I started cutting myself again. It was about half a year ago, I had just started feeling the pain again. The beast was back, with all its demons. I was having a really hard time at home, I was being pushed to the edges, and then one day I felt something break inside me. CRACK. And I was broken all over again. Everything I had so neatly packed away slipped out and broke free, again. It sneaked back under my skin and slowly took over. A part of me that most of my friends today had never even met is now out free, once again. And this part of me likes to cut.
When your soul hurts so bad that it feels like there is a living creature eating you up from the inside, cutting feels like the only way out of this pain. If my body is hurting, I will not concentrate in the soul-swallowing pain so much. If I cut my skin open, maybe the beast will get out and go away… So if I could choose between this inner suffering and the physical pain, ANY physical pain, I’d take the second anytime. I’d do it again and again. This is why I cut. But as soon as it is done, as soon as the wound is healed, the pain inside intensifies again. It is pointless and it leads nowhere. It is just an eternal loop of pain, causing pain, causing pain. I now try hard to avoid it. For the most part I manage. But sometimes, when I hurt, I close my eyes and dream of pushing razors through my skin…
The thing with cutting is that it is addictive. And strangely enough, reading about cutting or seeing other people’s scars can be triggering. A couple of months ago I saw a girl in the bouldering hall where I frequent. Her arms were completely scarred. Sliced through and through. Deep, big scars. I was shocked. I wanted to go to her and talk to her. I wanted to ask her if she was ok. I wanted to tell her I know how it feels. But I froze. I knew that if I were her, I would be too embarrassed. I don’t want anyone to notice. I don’t want to talk about it. As easy as it is to do it, it is so hard to talk about it… So I said nothing, just tried not to stare. And you know what I did next? I went home and researched “self-harm scars” for the first time in my life. I was confronted with horrible pictures. Arms and legs, damaged so bad, mutilated… I was shocked. I was scared. And then, in a typical me-manner, I was ashamed of myself. I thought “what I do is not really cutting” and “I barely scratch the surface — I don’t cut so deep” and, best of all, of course “what a loser, I don’t even cut properly”.
What a strange, funny thing triggering is. Seeing these horrible images and feeling sorry for the people doing this to themselves while at the same time wanting to do it myself. It is weird, I’ll admit it. It must have been a few days later, that I did it yet again. Saddest thing is, I was home with my partner and our little sons, and I couldn’t wait that they leave so that I could grab my razor and cut. I did it as soon as they were out the door.
I put my music loud, opened my drawer, unpacked my razor, drowned it in disinfectant, sat down on my desk and pushed through — ah! the relief! — I saw the glance of the razor through the tears in my eyes, felt the pressure and the burning pain, the slicing sensation on the skin… noticed the drop of blood appearing… the skin open up… the blood dripping… Fuck! FUCK! FUUUCK! What have I done??
This time, I went somewhat further than I normally would. I cut deeper than I used to. Not long, but deep. And when I realized how deep it was I freaked out. This mixture of relief and panic is really weird. On one hand my soul feels lighter again, the back of my mind feels calm, the screaming noise in my head kinda stops. On the other hand my rational brain kicks in and shouts “What the fuck are you doing? You are hurting yourself! You are hurting the people around you! Get a grip!”
I try not to do it anymore. I don’t always manage, but it’s getting better. When I do it, I try to tell someone. Just so. I need to do things differently this time around. I need to not become consumed. I need to trust…. Trust at least that I no longer have to go through this alone.
