Trigger Warning
I began to cut in 6th grade
I joined a negative online community as I began to fall further and further into depression, and saw all these girls like me who had found a way to express their pain, and their cuts were glorified
When I hit my first low point, I, a twelve year old from a middle class family with a full support system, took a shower and took my mom's razor and raked it against my skin
I shook as the blood beaded up on the white patch of new skin, where there used to be fully functional, normal skin
I looked at the razor clutched in my hand and saw the piece of skin that belonged on my body but was no longer there, then my mom walked it
I started crying, oh mom, I moved my hand wrong and I got cut
It hurts so bad mom
Please
It all hurts so much
I was sick, I still am
This began my journey of self injury
After that first time, I started with dragging paper clips, thumb tacks, and safety pins across my wrist
Slowly, I pushed harder and harder, until I could break skin without registering the pain the way I would've used to
Sometime between the beginning of this and the next year of school, I was told by a therapist the lines on my wrist were not worth attention, or conversation
It wasn't bad enough that a twelve year old child turned her internal pain into external, mutilating a body that had hardly started puberty
It wasn't bad enough to warrant correction, or even a discussion, so I made it bad enough
You got a call from a parents friend, 'I saw my sons texts and she said she was cutting herself'
So you came into the bathroom and took my iPod, only after yelling at me for lying
By winter of seventh grade I was bringing my scissors to school, sticking my healthy arm into my locker and coming out with more and more red lines
The amount of hair ties I kept to cover my wrist increased in number, from zero to five to more, then back to zero because long sleeves do the job better
Long sleeves, and a blade from a pencil sharpener I found in a discarded pencil pouch do their jobs so much better than a pair of hair ties and a pair of scissors
It left lines at first
Red lines, but not from blood, it's just a scratch
No matter how hard I pushed with the scissors, they couldn't mutilate me in the way I thought was needed
More, more, more
Deeper and deeper I went, into my arm and into depression
I'm fine
Oh, it's not an addiction
I could stop if I wanted to
Lies built walls between me and my loved ones, and I crumbled before those walls ever did
As the sickness consumed me, I began writing suicide notes, written in blood, and carving words into my skin
6 years of hurt later, (blood and innocence that I will never get back) I peaked when I fainted, from blood loss or pain I'm not sure, and I firmly decided to stop then and there, to never harm myself again, like I have promised myself so many times before
But like before I resorted to turning my emotional pain to physical, to save my life in the only way I knew how, but I'm not sure if I life built around destruction is a life worth living
