The Darkness Within Me.

the darkness within me chapter 5

Chapter Five

Journal entry #83

Year: 2007

I'm so proud of myself. Today has been a really hard day and I've felt really low all day. I could feel the pressure building up inside me again and I knew I was heading for one of my really dark moods. I shut myself away like I normally do and sat there waiting for the darkness to take over. But then I realised, I want to get better, so why do I just sit here and wait for it to happen? Why don't I do something to stop this before I self harm again like I know I will if I stay sat here? So I got up off my bed and went downstairs to the kitchen. I heard somewhere that gripping ice-cubes helps people to stop self harming so I went to the freezer and grabbed a handful of ice-cubes and put them in a small plastic bag. I went back to my room and sat in the dark where I feel safe. I was still feeling out of control but instead of cutting myself I pressed the ice to my arm where I would have cut myself. It was strange at first. I didn't feel like it was working, but then slowly I felt more and more in control. It wasn't the same kind of release that self harm normally gives me, but it helped, and it stopped me from cutting myself. It's the first time I have lost control but not self harmed since I told mom about it. And now I feel really proud of myself and I feel like there's hope. I can get better. It won't be easy and it will take a long time, but I know I can do it. I know I'll get back to being me eventually.

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It took me a long time, but eventually I got a lot better. I was happier and I had stopped self harming and I didn't need to use ice to stop it anymore. I knew that self harm wasn't a healthy way of coping with things and I didn't want to hurt myself or anyone else like that again. I stopped writing in my journal because writing about happy times is a lot harder than writing about things that upset you or make you unhappy. But I remember that I felt like I was getting back to the way I used to be and I was in a long term relationship, which was a big step for me because it meant that I was happy enough with the way I was to let someone else in, and to let them see the damage behind the act that people see every day.

Because even though I was a lot better, I still had very low confidence, so I started pretending I was a loud, confident person, to hide how insecure I was. I don't think that I ever really found a new way of dealing with my problems. I think that when I stopped self harming, and then when I stopped writing in my journal, I gradually started burying my head in the sand and ignoring my problems, because I don't remember ever finding another way of coping with things. And because of this things started to pile up on top of me. I think my recovery must have only lasted about one year, but it seemed like a lot longer. But eventually things got too much and I started self harming again. This time I didn't cut myself. I started scratching my arms and legs until I took layers of skin off. These injuries were easy enough to explain away because they looked like I'd scraped myself in a fall or burnt myself on the oven. That never really gave me much of a release, so I started using hot metal to burn myself. I didn't have the same need to draw blood as before.

The pain was enough, which meant I could justify what I was doing to myself by saying that it didn't matter because it wasn't as dangerous as drawing blood. Now I realise that you can never justify deliberately harming yourself, even if it is a way of coping, because it's not healthy and it's never going to solve all of your problems in the long run. I don't know if I would have had a better life if I'd never had depression, or if I'd never been through as much as I have, because everyone, at some point in their life, will go through some kind of pain and have difficulties in dealing with their problems. I think that maybe I would have had a very different life but that the things I've been through and my depression, have made me the person I am today and right now I wouldn't change anything. I don't always feel this way. In fact a lot of the time I'd give anything to be someone else, to look different, to feel different, and to have a different life. In my experience, depression seems to twist things so that everyone else seems to have a life that is so much better than your own, and small problems get magnified so that they take over until you panic and lose control. That's when I'm most vulnerable. I need to feel like I'm in control of my situation or I panic. Because in the past I haven't been able to control a situation and I've got depressed and felt out of control, so I've self harmed because it's the one thing only I could control. When things get too much for me I know I bury my head in the sand, but I'm trying to break the habit. But one of my main problems is that I find it hard to trust people. So I try and deal with everything on my own and let things get out of control because I'm too scared and not trusting enough to ask for help. This is part of the reason I ended up being ill again in 2009.

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