Hello again! I’ve been meaning to write sooner of course but you know how life can be sometimes. I finished my spring semester of college with straight A’s and am now trying to find a good job. I really want to start working in the school district since that’s what my major is but I have no idea about how to figure that out. And I have absolutely no prior experience aside from volunteering at Head Start for 20 hours. I am still going to look and see what I can find. I really want to get an early start on my career.
On a different note, I’m going to start typing and see if I can start spewing out more stuff about my history with self-harming. Now that I’ve been talking about it I feel as if it’s maybe a boring thing to be talking about? I’m not sure… like I should be talking about other things? But in reality I have nothing else I really want to say. I’m content with babbling on about my bad habits more than anything else.
I have been feeling sort of stressed out about my scars lately. Most of my scars are almost completely white so you can’t see them at first glance. However, I have some newer ones on my left arm that are still a bright red color. They’re probably the most ‘suicidal’ looking ones too since they’re going in the opposite direction of how I used to cut. These cuts are old-ish though… I think a few months old. Anyway, it’s starting to get warm and sunny outside which means I can’t wear my hoodies that I love to hide myself in. If I didn’t have these new scars I wouldn’t be worried but since they’re there and they look as bad as they do, I’m extra nervous. I have those same fears of people judging me and blah blah blah. See, if I was doing this for attention, why the hell would I have a freakin’ panic attack from someone seeing my scars? I don’t want anyone to see them if I really had the choice. I mean yeah, I do have a choice to hide them, but I really don’t want to go the extra mile and be uncomfortable just to protect my consciousness from being terrified of what others think. I don’t want to wear those stupid wrist warmers I used to wear or hoodies in 90 degree weather either. And I don’t want to be judged either. It doesn’t matter what other people think but if they’re judgments change how they’re going to treat/act towards me, then yes I’m going to give a flying fuck. I wish that more people would take the saying ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ more seriously. I’m a good example of that saying. I value my life more than anyone thinks haha.
So yeah, I’m nervous about showing my scars again. I think one of the hardest parts is having to explain what they are, why they look the way they do, and why I put them there. When I was still dating my ex—I think about 3 years into the relationship or so—I remember a particular time when he had asked why my scars look the way they do. They don’t look like scars from cutting. They look like scars from being sliced open and not getting stitches. We were taking a shower together when he asked me and I calmly explained to him why they look so wide instead of more thin like a normal cut. It made me feel weird to explain my little secret to someone, especially him. What I didn’t explain to him was that my urges were horrible and the normal cutting method wasn’t working for me anymore. I was getting more dangerous with it and edging more and more towards that boundary of life and death, stupidity and brains.
WARNING: This paragraph is graphic. Don’t read if you are squeamish. Just skip to the next paragraph if you have to. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. I had made this dangerous step one day in the school bathroom. It became a routine for me to self-harm before my math class started every single weekday. I started by using the bathrooms in one of the main buildings on campus before finally settling with a couple bathrooms in my math building. I think I switched because it gave me more time to self-harm if I was just down the hall from class instead of in another area on campus. So that one day I was in the bathroom in my not-math building on campus and was doing my normal cutting routine. Up until this point, I had made several cuts starting from the top of my wrist moving down towards my elbow. Every single cut I made was usually closed up with butterfly strips to avoid infection, bleeding through the bandages and clothing, horrible scars, etc. I was working on a particular cut when I unknowingly went deeper than I normally did. These strange puffy-transparent-fatty-looking particles pushed up through my flesh and spread the cut apart further than normal. I had absolutely no idea what it was at the time but knew that I had reached a new level. I had reached a new high when I didn’t think it could be possible. I had gotten to a huge rush that I only had the first time I started self-harming. Going this deep made it much harder to close up, though. I had to try and push the fat cells back down beneath the flesh so I could close up the cut and move on with my day. After closing up the cut with butterfly strips, I’d put a big bandaid or gauze on the wound and would put my wrist warmer or hoodie on. You know what my favorite part of this whole routine was? I used nothing but toilet paper to soak up the blood and such, which meant that I could just flush it when I was done. Yes. The perfect solution to the perfect crime. No trace left behind. No bloody tissues in the garbage can to scare anybody. Nobody would ever find out. I usually disposed of my ‘tools’ though by wrapping them in toilet paper and throwing them away in the garbage can. Nobody would see those since a bloody tissue would be more noticeable than a wadded up tissue that could possibly have copious amounts of snot or something. Ew. So from that point on, every time I cut, I would go that deep again and again. I wouldn’t stop and be completely satisfied until I reached those fat cells. But of course like with any addiction, it became boring again for me and I had to keep trying and trying to reach that ultimate high again. So the next thing I did was stop closing the cuts. I let them sit there, fat cells pushing out of my flesh and all, and heal open. I never got an infection because I knew exactly what I was doing and always was as careful as possible. Even though using toilet paper is dangerous since particles could come off into the wound… I never had a problem. The thrill in leaving my cuts open was indescribable. I ended up taking pictures of them just so I could see and relive that ultimate high I had achieved once again. I even took pictures of them with a penny next to the cut so I could see how open the cut was. Every time I go back and look at the pictures, I am completely floored at how little it shocked me at the time compared to how shocking it is now. I can’t believe how far into it I got. It completely amazed me… I couldn’t believe how close I was to that line, but how much control I had at the same time. That control is what drove me to continue without question. So of course if I was leaving these huge cuts open, I was definitely running out of valuable room on my arm. I moved to the other side of my arm (the same arm, since I’m right-handed) and had plenty of room there. I hated cutting in that area though because the skin felt more sensitive and I had a harder time being able to tolerate getting to the point that I was used to getting to. But I kept going. And I kept getting worse and worse and worse, which I can’t believe was even possible.
Anyway, I’ll continue another time. I have to be careful about writing too much at once because I get all worked up and stressed out as I relive what I did to myself. Eesh. Thanks again for reading. See ya!
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| Crowd-rafting? Could you imagine? |
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