The Story of My Scars
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I used to cut myself. For a period of time, I cut myself every single day. I was a habitual cutter.
I cut for the same reason most people cut: it’s the only pain we feel we can control. I was depressed, on Prozac, and totally numb. I couldn’t feel anything, I couldn’t cry — I was a shell of a person, living my life as if I were floating on a cloud. Time was passing me by and I sat around and watched, never quite feeling like I could catch up or slow down.
I enjoyed cutting. I enjoyed the instant pain that came from slicing my skin open. I used to think that whenever I cut myself I was both letting pain out and inviting pain in.
I never cried when I cut myself. I always wanted to but the medication stopped the tears from coming.
I formed a habit of picking scabs off of my healing cuts and then cutting over those cuts.
Brutal, huh?
The act of cutting is brutal but so is the mental anguish behind every moment that someone cuts themselves.
No one likes to talk about it.
No one likes to talk about being so mentally low that they’re cutting themselves because they need to feel something. No one wants to talk about cutting because they think it makes them look weak or unstable. But the reality is that two million cases of self harm are reported every single year in the United States.
People are suffering. Alone. In silence.
I was suffering. I had no desire to live because I couldn’t push past the cloudiness in my mind. I cut my forearms almost every day for a year.
I cut alone. In silence.
When I finally told someone, I didn’t use words. I pulled my sleeves up and showed them. When I did this, I cried. For the first time in a long time, I cried.
It was very difficult to stop cutting. My brain had developed a habit of cutting whenever I needed a release. I was harboring so much sadness and frustration, the only thing that made me feel any kind of relief was cutting.
I started seeing a therapist. It took a long time for me to let her in, but we eventually began making progress. She taught me to wear an elastic band around my wrist; whenever I felt the urge to cut, I was to snap the elastic against my wrist instead. It helped.
I cut myself for an entire year and it took me six months after that to stop. I walked away from that year and a half covered in scars on both of my forearms. I could run my fingers over every scar and remember exactly where I was when I made the cuts; I could remember every thought.
You can’t see my scars anymore. I have gotten tattoos to cover all of them.
I covered the stories of my scars with meaningful tattoos. The scars are not who I am; they are who I used to be.
In the right light I can see the scars under my tattoos and I can still remember the place that I was in when I made them. The scars don’t feel like they belong to me, though.
These scars belong to a girl who felt she had no way out. The girl who used to run into the bathroom at school and cut herself in the stall. The girl who used to sit in her room and use all of the strength that she could muster to force herself to cry, even though she never succeeded. The girl who experienced things that, even when she grew up, she would still not feel ready to talk about. These scars belong to the girl who always had a voice in her head telling her to press a little bit harder, cut a little bit deeper.
That girl grew up to be a woman who is very thankful that she did not cut any deeper than she did. The woman I am now can look back on the girl I used to be and talk about my experiences because I was able to get through them.
No one wants to talk about self harm… but it’s important that we do.
Anyone who is going through dark times right now could potentially find comfort in knowing that there are people out there who have made it out the other side. We might live with scars, but we made it through.
I wrote this during the year that I was cutting; this is what it was like inside of my mind:
