TSZ Magazine: July 2016 (Issue #2)

It Gets Better, I Promise

by Max (@piercethemax_)

Personal Story

"Life gives you enough scars,

You don't need to manufacture your own."

-Andy Biersack

On Saturday, 21 September 2015, a regular, sunny Saturday on the beautiful coastline with a glittering sun peeking through my bedroom window, I planned every peck of detail of the methods I was going to use to remove myself from this world. I wrote my suicide note, I had the correct amount of pills, I had my razors, I was ready to end it all that very night.

But I never did.

I was torn between life and death, I believed every single reason on earth for my existence was disintegrating beneath the tips of my fingers, that I didn't have a meaning in society.

What I've done to myself, to others, the hurt, the pain; I didn't take the negative energy and process it correctly, which inevitably left me dealing with a great amount of scars over my body and mind, embarrassed that people would ask me why and who or even leave me, because I have these scabs and scars scattered over my entire body since I was thirteen. I thought it was okay to hurt myself because I was hurt by so many outsiders.

My journey wasn't short lived, but to this very day I have an internal battle with myself to leave the razor alone and rather do something productive with myself — like writing stories.

So, why am I actually telling people my lethargic timeline between my adolescent years?

I didn't plan on writing a personal article for The Safe Zone Magazine, I figured I wanted to write an article because I like writing and the previous one I wrote for this movement was quite eccentric and I'd love to do it again. Did I bargain to rant about my own personal experience with a topic so dear to me, such a secret to me, that not even my mother knew of it after two years? I did, in fact, not. I didn't actually want to write it either, I don't like talking about myself, so why did I decide against it and wrote it?

My self-mutilation journey didn't start when I started feeling what felt like pangs of depression, it started, and much to my dismay when I made fun of it. To this day, I hate myself for making fun of self-mutilation, because I didn't think it'll become such a fragile topic for me.

My friends were making fun of self-mutilation. I didn't think too much of it at that time, but then my life took a turn out of the eye of the storm and set me inside the hurricane. I thought I was falling apart, people around me were dying, leaving, hurting me — so what conclusion did I come to, to subside the pain?

I resorted in pain.

To kill the pain with pain sounded so easy, it was so easy — just disassembling the closest pencil sharpener. I found myself a way to cope, but it didn't do any good.

Firstly, self-mutilation looks downright ugly. I did it all to cover up the scabs on my wrist — I wore sweaters in the middle of summer, I wore so many bracelets my arms were heavier than my shoes sometimes, I used concealer and foundations and every other makeup supply. It didn't work. I never liked going to the beach, because beaches meant bikinis, and there weren't only scabs on my arms, but my thighs, so I deliberately tried to hide from the thing that made me happy.

Secondly, it took what felt like a million years to heal, so I wore sweaters and long sleeves the entire summer, most of the time. My friends thought I had some kind of heat regulating problem; they probably thought I went completely bonkers, but they didn't ask.

After it became a temporary coping mechanism, I was completely hooked. I cut a lot of people out of my life, I started fights if people mocked self-mutilation. I became the monster I was hiding.