Essay, written by a 17 year old survivor

In a quest to re-connect with my younger self, I have been looking for clues of who I was age 4-16. I looked for photos, but none seem to exist. Then I remember a piece of writing, an essay I wrote for a school assignment at 17, but never handed it because it was simply too raw.

The class was English creative writing. We were to write an essay entitled "me". This is what I wrote:

Why tell my story?

Today is exactly one year since I started writing down my story. And what a year it has been!

I started off very motivated. I wrote in blog-format, completing at least one post a day, some days more than one. I dissected all the horrors of my childhood in the minutest detail, recalling sights, sounds and smells, going back to old journals to verify dates, reliving everything as I sought to inject the appropriate emotions into my writing.

It all proved to be too much. By January of this year, I was sinking into a deep depression. Continuing to write through the pain, I eventually crashed back onto the bathroom floor with a paring knife, my tears mixing with the blood dripping from my arm.

The next day, frightened into action by my self-inflicted wound, I made two decisions:
1. I needed to stop the recall, to stop writing.
2. I needed to go back to therapy.

Controlling the urge to cut

I am not a trained professional. I cannot write a definitive guide on how to control the urge to self-injure. I suspect that even if I was a trained professional, I would still be hard-pressed to come up with such a guide. What I can do, is share what worked for me. If you are someone who struggles with this, I hope this helps. However, I would still urge you to get professional help.

1. Solving the root cause

I want to start by saying that the holy-grail of conquering the urge to cut, lies in resolving the underlying issues that cause the urge. Cutting is a coping method. It satisfies a need. As long as this need exists, you will have a hard time controlling the urge to cut. Read more about his from my post Self-injury: what's that all about?. Obviously addressing that need takes a lot of time and work. You will need ways to cope in the short term.

Self-injury: What's that all about?

I've been battling with an urge to cut myself the last few days, so I decided that I might as well channel it into something useful, and try to write a post explaining what self-injury is all about. The fact is - although self-injury is something that is generally associated with "emo" teenage girls, both men and women of all ages struggle with this.

Self-injury has many facets. That is part of the reason why it is so hard to understand.

The reasons why people injure themselves are often listed as the "8 Cs":

1. Coping and Crisis intervention
2. Calming and Comforting
3. Control
4. Cleansing
5. Confirmation of existence
6. Creating Comfortable numbness
7. Chastisement
8. Communication

Alone

The purpose of this blog was not to share my personal struggles. It was meant to be an educational blog. It was meant to be a place full of information and full of hope. But today the loneliness is too much to carry. I'm not sure if anyone will be able to learn anything from this post, but I need to talk to someone and this is the only place I have left.

I need to bleed.

Now, it would be a simple thing to take a blade and draw blood from any convenient vein. But I'm not yet far enough gone to loose sight of the fact that doing this would only compound the weight that I'm carrying today. It would create another secret. More shame. More to hide.

It would isolate me further.

I have a confession to make

*** May Trigger - Self Injury ***

In the epilogue to my story, I say that the last time I cut myself was in the spring of 2000.

That isn't strictly true. I did go many years without cutting after that, but it wasn't the last time.

The last time I cut was the beginning of this year. 2012. I can't remember the date, but I think it was a Thursday.

I had just started writing down my story, and I was very, very vulnerable. I was getting nightmares again, and that terrible, unbearable feeling of emptiness was back. I wanted so badly to feel... anything. But the only time I felt anything was when the memories came flooding back and made the scars on my soul ache until I wished I could be numb again.