Topic: self-harm
Often, I find myself wondering what prompted me down the spiral of self-injury. Was it because I was dissatisfied with myself and felt the need to inflict pain upon so many different regions of my body? Or was it perhaps that I felt I deserved to be punished for being so fragmented and unwhole?
Her mom was young and didn’t want to be a mother. Her parents were barely married before her birth and divorced soon after. They hate each other. They blame her for their anger.
I’ve taken to calling the marks in my skin my “war wounds.” They are the scars that remained when the fight was finished, and the evidence that I was stronger than that which had tried to harm me.
On my road to recovery from self-harm, I knew that asking for help was always going to be the most difficult step—but essential if I wanted to get better. And so I did something that scared me: I pushed the keys to spell out the word "CONNECT" and sent the message to 741741. Then, I waited.
I have a history of substance abuse and self-injury. My work is all about encountering people who know these struggles intimately as well.
Slowly over time though, I began to regain that energy to eat, to shower, to socialize, to be creative.
Just over a year ago, I was hospitalized because I was going to kill myself. My depression and anxiety had gotten so bad that I was convinced that my death was the best solution...
With the following 28 keystrokes, I am going to write one of the most difficult sentences I have ever written for a public audience: I struggle with self-injury.
Over the last three years, I’ve strung together periods of time where I was clean from self-harm for a single day, an entire week, even ten months — only to relapse. It’s frustrating. But there’s no shame in that. Today though, I’ve reached a full year of being clean.
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