Living With Scars
The thing is, my scars—what should be a sign of healing, perseverance, and survival—can be the most triggering thing.
Topic: self-harm
The thing is, my scars—what should be a sign of healing, perseverance, and survival—can be the most triggering thing.
Take a step back and look at all the other days which terrified you, and you still made it through.
If healing is finite, I am far from being healed, but I am not broken.
You don’t have to survive and endure pain to be strong. Sometimes being strong means freeing yourself of it.
Maybe you’re like me, wondering if the temptation to harm yourself will ever go away. If I’m being honest, I really wish it would.
I reached five years of being self-harm free this past October. It was a milestone that often seemed impossible to achieve.
It was a matter of telling myself, “I want to live,” even when all I wanted to do was die.
It’s possible to live with scars, to feel the same pain you feel right now and to not hurt yourself because of it, to want to stop.
Time doesn’t tell you about the late-night phone calls answered, the grocery store runs when the razors were returned to the shelf, or the first time I decided to walk out the door wearing shorts.
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.
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