Diamond Heart

Chapter 3- Some Backstory

CONTENT WARNING: This chapter contains some cussing, mentions of an eating disorder, mentions of abuse, and a graphic description of self-harm as well as other mentions of methods and tools used to self-harm. 

Before I continue, I want to make something clear: I'm not here to glamorize my life, or the choices I've made. I don't want you to read this and think of how beautiful my tragedies are, how the "Apple System" is a good one that you should try. I don't want a single one of you to wish that you were anorexic like I was, that you could look in the mirror and see your once well-fitting clothes falling from the bones that stick out, that you could lose thirty pounds in two weeks because you couldn't bear to put a fucking fork of food into your mouth. When I describe how and when I would cut myself, I am not here to give you ideas. When I write about the lies and secrets I kept hidden from my loved ones, I am not giving you inspiration. I am here to write about my life, and nothing more. You are here to read about my life, and take away from it all the things you shouldn't, and sometimes should, do.

When I got into the shower, it was around 1:10 in the afternoon. When I finally managed to haul myself out, it was 4. Time had a way of slipping right by me, a thief in the shadows taking away moments of my life that could have been precious but were instead wasted. So much of my life was meaningless. Meaningless or full of pain. I started recognizing symptoms of depression at age 11 or 12, though my mom claimed she started seeing problems when I was 3, after my biological dad hit me and then eventually fled to Mexico. Initially I had thought one of two things. One: Everyone else felt this empty cavern in their chest, everyone felt resistant to eat, and everyone felt isolated, abandoned, and cried to themselves at night. Or two: I was the world's biggest fucking freak and there was something so entirely wrong with me but I had absolutely no clue what to do about it, and I couldn't tell a soul because then I'd be publicly burned at the stake for being so inhuman. Option two seemed much more viable after a particular incident in my kitchen when I came home from school one day.

I was putting dishes from the dishwasher away into their rightful cabinets when I dropped one of our ceramic bowls. The shards scattered on the wood, big and small like triangular flower petals. This...feeling began to grow in the pit of my stomach and because I didn't quite know what it was, I ignored it as I slowly gathered the pieces into a pile. One of the pieces close to my knee caught my eye and the feeling expanded from my stomach to my entire body, and I lost my sense of control. In a daze, my right hand moved to pick up the fragment. It was about the size of my palm, and sharper than expected. Somewhere in my head something was telling me to just put it in the pile, but the rest of me didn't listen, didn't know how to care. Without blinking, without moving any other muscle, I slowly moved the tip across my upper left thigh.

There was a moment when it looked like nothing had happened, but the cut became suddenly visible when blood rushed up to meet it. The red looked so beautiful, so soothing, that I kept going. The odd thing about it was that it didn't hurt one bit. One after another, my hand moved almost artfully across my legs until there were about a dozen cuts all leaking blood that dripped down the sides of my thighs. Something that almost seemed like a voice finally said, "That's enough now," in a gentle reminder to keep cleaning up the rest of the broken bowl.

I'm unsure when the trance broke. I just remember sitting with my knees on the floor, the bowl in the trash can, looking down absolutely horrified at the blood seeping from my body. I ran upstairs, threw my shorts and tank top to the floor, and jumped into the shower. For a long time I've believed that incident was caused by a demon, tempting a child into the world of self-torture. It was like a drug-dealer. The first time is free, with no pain, just an odd sense of euphoria and freedom. Those cuts didn't even leave scars- just thin, light pink lines that were barely noticeable. And the demon was good at its job.

I kept coming back for more and more, even though it started to hurt. I looked for every possible way. Burning myself with hot water, candles, lighters. Cutting and scratching with keys, my own nails, razor blades, screws, knives. I tried just about every place- my outer and inner arms, my calves, my stomach, my chest, my thighs. Finally, I found my favorite combinations. Broken glass on my upper outer thighs, and my nails on my stomach. I would break light bulbs, shatter them on the corner of my desk and take the shards I liked the most. I would keep them in several places for my own convenience. One in the bathroom, one by my bed, one hidden downstairs, one in my backpack. These systems I set in place for myself lasted for years. They were proven to work, and they suited my purposes well.

Maybe you want more backstory. How I got to be this way in the first place, what traumatic incident/s led me to my eventual diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder. The truth is, there is no one specific incident that I can recall. Just a bunch of straws that ended up breaking the camel's back. Through elementary school, it all crept up on me slowly. It wasn't until later in my life that things would start to really punch, knock me to the ground until I was gasping for breath. Of course, there was my biological dad when I was three, but other than that incidents just stacked on top of one another until I broke under the weight of it all. My mom found another man a couple years after my biological dad fled the U.S. I was seven when we all moved into a house together- my mom, my new dad (Mike), and his best friend for over twenty years (Ray). It was a lovely two-story, four-bedroom house that treated us well for about seven years. That pretty home in its pretty neighborhood, by pretty schools with pretty people that were full of ugliness. I've always loved California, and the town in which we resided, a quaint place called Carlsbad, but I have never loved the schools I went to there, or an overwhelming majority of the people I encountered.

Sometimes we were a loving, happy family that could appear on an ad, with our two dogs and healthy green lawn. Sometimes we slammed our doors shut and locked them not only from the outside world, but each other. Sometimes we didn't want to protect ourselves from others; we wanted to protect others from the fire raging inside of our lonely hearts. And sometimes we let the fire loose and tried our best to control it when we were done. But some embers got loose, and another fire began to grow. We couldn't see it until it was too late. Until there was already smoke in our lungs and ash in our eyes. For too long it burned unseen, devouring our love and compatibility until there was nothing but memories weakly gluing us together. By the time we recognized it, we were already swallowed whole by the flames of familial destruction. I dropped out of my high school, my dad and his friend found their own place in Oceanside, and my mom and I went to Colorado.