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Possibly Triggering - My story
I wrote this for my psych nurse. She wanted me to talk in her presentation about selfharm and it turned out like this. Cait posted the draft of this a while back. This is it "finished" Bit long but comments appreciated x
In four years a lot can change. Fat to thin. Young to old. Happy to sad. In four years you could grow from a content 12 year old to someone who has totally lost themselves, blindly flailing in a world that seems so eager to reject them. It’s amazing how rapidly your whole being disintegrates with just harsh stab of depression, how utterly unreachable and isolated you feel, how futile everything becomes.
I don’t know where the idea emerged from. I wasn’t even aware self harm existed. I guess I recognised that what I was doing was wrong but it all seemed so strangely normal.
I’d been feeling awful throughout the previous months. Feeling so low and desperately out of control. There was nothing in particular that triggered me, maybe that’s why I turned to self destruction as there was nothing substantial to tackle. They were just thoughts, just feelings. Things I had no control of. I’d ended up starving myself as a method of coping as I recklessly grabbed at anything that might ‘help’. Hurting myself just seemed like a natural progression.
I can’t really remember the first time I cut myself. It just seemed the right thing to do. I was hurting so much inside and the feeling of relief it brought was justification enough to become part of society’s taboo.
After a while, its enchanting efficiency makes it a wholly plausible act to indulge in. While on one hand you yearn to separate from the world, self harm can perversely unchain you from the dissociated state you exist in. Self harm is bittersweet. It’s multipurpose. I loathed myself and what I’d become, so cut as punishment. Abnormally, other times it was self preservation but now there isn’t anything left that I crave to protect.
It’s hard to put thoughts and feelings into words when you can’t understand their unfathomable depths. So I put them to my skin instead in a futile effort to express what I can’t and couldn’t say. Making my body become my voice. Deeper and deeper to pursue what seems endless. To see crimson blossoming from your skin makes the pain visible. It’s an escape from your mind, some how making what you feel valid. If you forget the reason you’re bleeding, just for a moment, it becomes acceptable. A cut can be fixed. All within the bounds of sane human understanding. Perhaps that is what I was ultimately searching for.
In the past few months, self harm has purely become a release. I no longer search for answers. I’ve resigned myself to this existence and will snatch at anything for even a second of relief from the constant round about motion in my head. I know that those few minutes of reprieve will be worth the guilt and the crash of reality that will unfailingly follow.
I feel like I’ve lost a part of myself. That maybe I’d been two people depression had caused to divide. I don’t actually I think I’m ‘me’ anymore. I’ve come to the point where I can’t remember being ‘me’. I’m sure I was, before all this, but I’m at the point where I can’t recall any fragment of happiness from my past. Sure I can look at the pictures, the smiles, the laughs I’m sure to have had, but you can’t capture feelings in photographs. They can undeniably evoke feeling, but now only of regret and longing for ‘Emma’ to come home. She went leaving this despairing, desolate void within me that I continue desperately to satisfy.
It’s like one of those bad dreams. The one where you’re trying to run, trying to scream but you’re stuck and no one can hear you.
Depression is one of the loneliest things you could experience. It feels so terminal yet there never seems a natural end in sight so, eventually, you plan your own. Every detail, circling your accolade of finality. It becomes beautiful. You’re saviour.
I remember my first suicide attempt. The world had failed me. I’d failed life. Nothing was working and I felt such an overpowering, intense feeling of desperation, I needed to escape. Novice as I was, I ingested the contents of a packet of paracetamol and lay down, believing that that was it. The next morning, when I realised I’d survived, albeit feeling physically awful, I felt worse than ever. Nothing can prepare you for the morning after, but still, it didn’t put me off.
From that point onwards, particularly 2006, I frequently overdosed on anything I could get my hands on. Most were frantic runs towards my demise although occasionally I just did it to numb the pain. I subsisted in a haze of prescription drugs. Constantly ill. Throwing up. Hallucinating. No one ever knew how bad it had got. I just didn’t make eye contact with my parents and my symptoms so readily fit in with a stomach bug. I couldn’t tell anyone. It’s the big full stop to confidentiality.
Sometimes my mind breaks away from such deep despair and flies to the other end of the spectrum. It’s horrible how you can suddenly feel so ‘live’, yet at the same time have the same sense of such deep unease within yourself that depression plagues you with. Self harm can bring you back down to earth. Anchor you back to reality. It calms and soothes you watching the madness flow out. Relieves you from the height of agitation.
In the beginning I tried everything anyone offered. I dutifully took the pills that I was told to take, went to every appointment, filled in those irritating little CBT diaries to the hour. I had an admittedly naïve hope that I could recover. Something that time has taken from me. I don’t “live” under a false pretence anymore. There has to be a cut off point. Sometime when you have to let go.
There will always be things I should stay for, people I should live for but maybe suicide, however premature, is the only way of escaping. I worry that this pit is bottomless and I’m merely teetering on the edge of another fall. Opting out is more attractive than enduring life.
This is so much more than self harm. Cutting is a consequence, not a symptom. Although continuing won’t cure me, neither would stopping.
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You rock my socks
