| Self Injurers That self injury only occurs in the mad, the manic depressive and the suicidal is a myth. It happens to people you'd never suspect as well as those you do. |
| I had a problem. It�s a problem that is said to only affect one percent of the population, but I believe it�s more wide spread than that. It does not take a stance towards someone due to their race, religion, sexual orientation or even age, although it does have more of a female following. Self-mutilation can take on many forms. For some they strike themselves, they pull their hair, inflict burns, break bones, cut themselves or not let themselves heal properly. Some consider aggressive tattooing, body piercing and drug use as other forms of self-mutilation, but as I don�t see them as such I�m just going to leave them out. Seventy-eight percent of that one percent of the people that inflict harm upon themselves do more than one of the above. Society has come up with reasons and cures, but not everyone can fit into the cookie cutter mold of their creation. People who mutilate themselves are generally not suicidal. People who commit or attempt suicide do so in the effort to get away from everything in a permeate escape. People hurt themselves to get better, to feel alive. To be alive one needs to feel and one of the easiest things to feel is pain. It doesn�t need emotional ties, or deep meaningful thoughts or even the exertion of an abundant source of energy. Being alive is also being warm. To bleed, for you need to be living to have the flow of blood spill over. Feelings of hollowness and numbness can bring forth feelings of impending death. I was a cutter. I took sharp pointy objects and would tear at my skin with it. I would rarely cry with the pain. I would, however, cry with the relief of being able to feel, that I was still alive. More times than not, I would hurt myself to make the hollowness go away. To me there is no feeling worse than that, the absence of feeling. There were other times it was the lack of control that I could exert on my life that caused me to administer pain onto my own person. At the tender age of ten I would use safety pins and sewing needles. I didn�t cut myself, I just broke the skin. Just enough to draw blood. It wasn�t yet the remembrance of pain that drew it to me, but the feeling of my blood. It was so warm, and not as numbingly cold as I felt. It wasn�t until I reached high school where the numbness gradually faded away into no feeling at all, and the pain then became part of the allure. I could still feel most of the time. I could still call up emotions, but there were moments of which they just weren�t there. Where I couldn�t stir up a single hope or dream, fear, anger... Nothing. As the years passed by these dry spells would crop up with a frightening increase in frequency and stayed with me longer. Simple prickings of the skin could no longer control my growing feelings of nothingness. I started cutting my legs, my stomach, my arms. Places that would bleed. Places with nerves. Places that would hurt. I would watch the blood flow out of my cuts. It would warm me, but the blood always grew cold. So, I would cut deeper and more often. I stayed warmer that way. I am repeatedly told that the answers to all my problems lay within a psychiatrist and untimely in a pill that I would have to take in order to be a �normal, healthy individual.� I decided that this route wasn�t for me. I�ve seen too many people my own age be told to take pills as if a high priced drug is a panacea, and all the great and little ills of their lives would magical cease to exists. If this was the answer to my problems, I�d much rather remain �neurotic�. Instead I learned to honestly cry; to talk to people that care about me for who I am, not because my parents are paying them to. At first I was upset with all of them. I felt that they too were against me. I was mad, not angry, at my friends who lectured and yelled and threatened. Now I see how much they cared, and for that I shall have a place in my heart set aside for them always. I am not suicidal. I am, however, a neurotic individual. I can see the beauty in the deliverance of pain. I still see my scars and even though most people would see them as ugly, I cannot see them as that. They show me my past. Now they�re slowly fading away, and it saddens me. |