suicide storys

christina

My Secret Addiction

CHRISTINA G.

I first cut myself when I was 13. I was feeling depressed and dead inside. I noticed a box of blades lying on the kitchen shelf. I took a blade and carried it back to my room.

I closed the door, mulled it over for about a minute, and then made a small, vertical cut, about a centimeter long, to the underside of my left wrist. At first I felt nothing, as usual, and then came the pain—like a paper cut—and the feeling that a door had been opened. My heart beat really fast and I felt a rush; I felt powerful, and alive.

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Two drops of bright blood appeared, darkening as they fused into one. I squeezed and scratched in order to make the cut bleed more. After about two more drops, the blood refused to come out. Then I went to lie down and soon after came down from the rush. I felt guilty about what I’d done.

But after about a week, I tried it again. Though it may seem hard to understand, it felt good to feel something after so long feeling nothing. And soon it became a regular part of my life.

A lot of the problems that finally led me to cut myself began back in elementary school. I was extremely shy and I found myself unable to go to school. At first it was the building itself I couldn’t enter. Then once I was inside the building, I couldn’t go into my classroom. I would become absolutely paralyzed at the entrance.

In junior high, I used to just sit in the stairwell and cry. Lots of days I’d decide to skip school completely. When I wasn’t in school, most days I’d stay home and watch television, read, write and play.

For the first two years or so, that was pretty much OK. But after that, I began to hate myself—the school situation, my weight and my shyness. I began not to care about the way I dressed, or if I got dressed in the morning at all. I’d stay up all night watching television or I’d sleep half the day. I almost never went out.

I was like this until high school. All along, adults called me crazy. In elementary school, one social worker even told me I belonged in the psychiatric ward of the hospital.

My junior high principal said that if I didn’t go to class I would be taken away from my house and locked up. He once shoved me up the stairs, dragged me down the hall crying, and pushed me into my classroom. He told my class that I had “psychological problems.” Needless to say, I ran out of that school and never returned.

Everyone tried to take control of my life and find out what was “wrong” with me. I was sent to a therapist against my will. They tried to push me and guide me, but they only succeeded in backing me further into the corner I was in. I began to trust only myself and became even more depressed.

By the time I was 13, I found myself growing more and more apathetic. The first therapist I ever liked had gone on leave and I got shifted to a woman who I hated almost as much as I hated myself.

It was at that time that I started cutting myself. I would think about it first and then finally decide doing it was better than not doing it. In the beginning I usually just made one cut at a time, every few days or so. But after a while I began to make more cuts.

By the time I was 14, I was doing it several times a day, and sometimes I’d even slash myself many times in hidden places, like my chest. Most of the cuts were in places where I figured no one would ever see or think that it was deliberate.

image by Thomas Yip

I could pass off cuts on my fingers for paper cuts, for example, and cuts on my arms as accidents. I’m a very private person, so I kept it hidden as best I could. (I guess there was also a little vanity, because I never cut myself too deep in places where I didn’t want scars.)