It's 3am and I can't sleep💭

Do I need it? Am I under control? Can I beat it?

When I had to (forcefully) quit self harming I thought that it would be simple. "Just don't harm yourself", easy enough huh? Yes, simple as that. You try to forget it, until 1 or 2 weeks later things get rough again and the only thing you can think is "I need to do it, there's no other way for this to go away", until 1 month later and the scars begin to itch and you want to tear your skin apart from your body, until people start noticing your scars and ask "why did you do that?" and even you start to ask yourself "why did i do that?", until you accidentally cut yourself and want to give up "even if it was an accident, I already did it so there's no reason to keep trying not to do it anymore". No, it's not easy. It's not simple. Before you recover 100% from self harm it'll humiliate you, make you feel ashamed, make you wonder if you really had a reason to do it in the first place. You'll try to make fun of it with your friends just so they can either pity you or laugh in an attempt to make you feel better.
It's been a year since my scars have healed, but they don't seem to go away anytime soon. For sometime I avoided to wear tank tops or any dresses that fully showed my arms, I noticed the way that people looked at it, some with pity some with disgust. That made the process even harder. Even at my own home, it was clear the look of disappointment on my parent's face. Took me sometime, but I slowly started to wear whatever I wanted. Fuck, I even tried to "love" my scars, act like they were some kind of resilience trophy or whatever. That didn't worked out for much long, the "your scars show how strong you are" argument that people threw at me wasn't working anymore.
In these last few months, with the death of my stepfather, it was pure luck (or miracle) that I didn't end up with a body full of new scars, there is a few new little ones but nothing compared to what I was doing back in 2022. Should I be proud? Most of the time I feel like I should just give up, I mean, is it really worth? All of the effort I've had quitting it will really count at the end of it all? I mean, am I doing this bc i really want to stop or is it just bc I don't want any more scar for my self of the future to deal with? And what if I'm having all of this work to stop and this future never comes? Everything is so uncertain. Well anyways, happy 1 month and a half of not self harming for me:D
(Jack Stauber reference in the title yeyy)