Post by EmberRoze on Sept 2, 2009 22:24:41 GMT -6
It sat underneath my alarm clock, waiting for me to break down, waiting until I would pick it up and let it taste the tang of copper again. It sat beneath my alarm when I slept and when I awoke everyday, reminding me of how weak I really was. Every time I snapped and sprinted home, to tear it from its hiding spot, it never laughed or jeered. It simply sat between my thumb and forefinger as I fought with my anger, my sadness, and my hatred. It never had to say anything as it warmed in my hand – My shame and disgust whispered enough in my ears at those time.
It wasn’t until this summer, almost a full three years after I lost all control and stumbled into my gaping hole of self-hatred and depression, that I finally found the strength to throw my last razor. I hadn’t used it in almost two years (my keys had since replaced it), but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it. The thought of having to go through daily life without that lifeline there terrified me to my very core. In some twisted line of thought, it had become almost like a safety blanket to me, and I clung to it.
I don’t know exactly when or why I started to hate myself as much as I did. All I really know is that as I progressed through my later elementary years, I started to see myself in a different light, a light that I didn’t like. The insecurities I developed early due to bullying and naivety in life only flared, nearly crippling me with worry every day. I didn’t know how to keep more than one friend, and anyone I tried to get close to shied away for unspoken reasons after a month or two. I couldn’t see myself as a beautiful or even cute girl. All I saw in the mirror was a round faced, curly haired mess whose skin wouldn’t listen and whose body kept changing in stupid ways. I just saw a wannabe who kept hiding behind her “tough girl” attitude when really, she was just afraid to let people know her.
These worries only intensified as I entered junior high and merged with everyone in the district. That year, I lost more “friends” than I care to remember, and all for one silly reason – I didn’t fit into the “mold” that formed their clique. I had my first encounter with puppy love, and when it ended, he and his best friend made it their past time to torment me and make my life a living hell. By the end of my seventh grade year, my self image, my self satisfaction, and my self esteem were shattered and scattered across the world.
At this time, there’s one memory in particular that sticks out like a sore thumb in my mind. It was one of my good days, a day when I felt almost human. I was outside waiting for my bus with two of my buddies on that crisp early spring day. My hands were cold, but I could have cared less as I stood there and laughed with them, cajoling and smiling.
A smile is an easy enough thing to do. Most people will smile without a thought, without qualm. After less than a minute on this day, it physically hurt me to smile. Shocked by this revelation, I stopped. I fell into thought, trying frantically to remember when I had last smiled a real smile. Not a memory came to mind as I thought months and months into the past. When Abby and Becky noticed, they stopped laughing too, and asked what was that matter. I could only look at them, dumbfounded.
“It hurts to smile.”
They both sobered immediately and just looked at me, clearly unsure of what to say. Becky started to say something, but I had to interrupt her.
“Thank you.”
My trek down the road of self-mutilation started easily enough. In elementary school, I developed the habit of lightly scratching the palms of my hands and my inner arm when I was anxious or nervous. There were never any marks left, nor any redness created. It was just a weird tick. As my anxiety and nerves intensified, however, so did my tick. I started to leave marks when I scratched. I scratched harder and harder until I would leave marks all across my arms for days at a time. I would feel better afterward, calmer, and more at ease. The pain gave me something to focus on other than my insecurity.
At a time, I did pull a razor from my dad’s tool box in the garage. I tried to use it to cut deeper, to see more of the blood that pumped through my body, but the most I ever got was a little paper cut sort of wound. I couldn’t tolerate the pain of the sharp metal, so I just kept it hidden as a reminder of how to control everything. I started to wear long sleeves more often to cover the scratches and scabs, and started falling more and more into the “emo” style. This only served to add to the teasing and bullying. More than once I was called a cutter and an emo brat. People didn’t know how much their words were actually hurting and harming me or the others they threw the words so carelessly at.
With the combination of hormones, tried friendships, bullying, and tense relations at home, my already ferocious temper exploded. I couldn’t go a day without yelling at someone, without losing all semblance of control that I had. Eventually, my temper turned from flaring out and burning others to wrapping itself around me, tearing apart my insides and my sanity. I didn’t know how to cope with this knew sensation of having my anger trapped inside my chest, simmering, bubbling, boiling. Most of the time, I just waited until I could get home, where I would go and lie on my bed and bawl for an uncertain amount of time and create new injuries, new ways to feel the pain that somehow tied me to Earth.
The summer between my eighth grade year and my entrance into high school, everything I felt to that point, everything I worked toward avoiding, combined into a storm and broke over my head. Within that first week of summer, I got into a fight with my sister over something I have no memory of while two of my best friends sat at the table. I couldn’t calm down afterward, no matter how hard I tried. Eventually, I told my friends that they would be better off going home. They left without saying goodbye. Later that night, four of my other friends made a point of calling me a “selfish bitch”. By the end of the week, I lost everyone I thought I could trust. I never found out why, or what was said to make them feel that way. I was isolated from everyone but family, but even that changed.
Not even a week after the catastrophe of a sleep over , my grandmother, who I shared a room with for two years, and a home with for five, fell ill. She had to be taken to the hospital in the morning of June 3rd. I heard her calling for my mom for twenty minutes at the very least, and I ignored her because I didn’t want to take responsibility. She died three weeks later. I never got to apologize.
The rest of my summer I spent with my sister, grieving and moping about. I had no friends. I lost my grandma. My mom was lost in her own grief. Erika did as much as she could with me, but at the end of August, she moved into her dorm and left home, bound for college.
During this time, I scratched harder and deeper than ever before. I almost always broke skin and bled. It was also during this time that I felt most at control over my emotions, my body, and my life.
The thought of suicide crossed my mind more than once, and I one day even reached for one of the shotguns in the basement, but something always held me back, something beyond fear of the unknown. I don’t know what it was, but I’m thankful for it every time I think of how close I did come to ending my life.
My freshman year rolled around without any huge footnote in my life. By this time I had sunk so low into my line of thought, that most days, it was enough to pull myself out of bed and get my butt to school on time. My grades fell short of their normal A’s, and I could have cared less. I hated myself so much that the only reason that I still wanted to succeed in school was so I wouldn’t disappoint my parents more than I clearly already had. The only thing that truly mattered to me then, was that I was still here for some reason.
I had lessened up on the scratching, and only fell back into it when I was truly upset. It went from my to make it through the day to my coping mechanism to my destructive and volatile anger. Instead I would find ways to bruise myself. I would pinch myself, hit my head on walls, and at one point, I slammed a door on my hand and arm. My only connection to reality was pain.
I floated through the year, making friends and losing friends, succeeding in school and struggling with it, crawling to the surface, only to be pulled back in. In my mind, my low points became my “remissionary” points, and I tried to aim to make myself happy, no matter what. That only served to make me more miserable, unfortunately.
During this year, I became very self aware of what I was going through. I knew that I needed help, but I didn’t know how to get it. My fear kept me at bay from actively seeking it. I eventually gathered the courage to talk to my mom after weeks of coaxing from my then boyfriend. She sat down with me that night for three hours as I sobbed out my story from the last few years of my life. She told me I didn’t need to see anyone, but she would talk with me when I needed her. About six months after I first broke down and told her, sobbing, that I wanted to die, she looked at me in the hallways as tears streamed down my face, emotionless.
“Elise, I can’t do anything to help you.” This alone shocked me. She was the person I needed to talk to. I didn’t need her to help me. I just needed her to be there. She wasn’t done however. “You’re doing this to yourself. I can’t help but think that you want to make yourself this miserable. You don’t want to be happy. You want to have something to complain about. What you fail to see is that you have a good life. I don’t know why you’re wasting it away hating yourself.” With that, she turned to her room, and left me in the hallway, alone.
Her words were the hardest thing I have heard in my life. The thin relationship we had was shattered in that instant, and I haven’t been able to turn to her with my real worries in life since. Everything we have now is based around generalizations or politics.
It was spring when the last piece of straw broke my back, during my soccer season. I had a terrible coach that year. She made sport of it to humiliate me in front of my teammates and her fellow coaches. Anything I did wrong, she made a point to make a snide comment in front of the team. For any other person, she took them to one side. I couldn’t talk to her without her donning overly condescending attitude.
The one time she did offer a compliment, it was also a backhanded reprimand.
“You have a good long shot. By the way, don’t be late to practice again.”
That day was my first back from Florida for the band trip for the high school jazz band. Practice had been an hour early, and I had been completely unaware of the fact, despite having asked four or five people what time the practice was at. I had explained this to her when I arrived a half hour late.
She made me hate practice, games, and even the sport. I could do nothing without her being nasty and rude in return. Most days I left the field crying. It was then that I found I could cut without a razor. My keys sufficed in their place, biting through skin and letting my blood flow away from my veins as I sat in my car, crying, after practice. On almost a daily basis, I would tear my skin apart with the rough edges of my house key after practice, just to release what was bubbling beneath my skin, just to feel something.
I reached my absolute lowest at this time. Most days I hated even waking up, and I practically prayed at night to never again have to open my eyes for another day. I cut myself so often then that I became anemic. I was sick almost constantly. I even began to lose weight. No one took notice though, because I took care that no would ever find about my weakness, about my shame, about how much I hated myself.
I kept it secret for a reason – I didn’t want anyone to see who I really was, and how I really felt. I didn’t want to be sent away to get better. Most of all, I was terrified. Help hadn’t worked before, so why would it then? Who was to say they wouldn’t just say that I was making it all up too?
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I wasted time away, jumping between high points and low points so frequently that I became almost totally convinced that I was bipolar. In a single day, I might change my state of mind four to five times when years prior, it would take months to make the same leap. As the summer came to a close, my mood started to settle, and I only made a leap or two a day once I began classes again.
My sophomore year took much the same route as my freshman year, except I faced more highs than lows. Gradually, I started to see the world with a different light. I took an active stance against my depression. By the spring, when it finally rolled around, I saw not the chubby faced, curly haired, awkward girl of my elementary days, I saw not the sullen, heavily made-up, angry glare of my junior high years, nor saw I the apathetic, blank eyed, sullen cheeked, pale girl from a year ago. I had vibrance now, and I glowed with health. I had grown into my body, away from my awkwardness. The scars that I took care to make sure never formed, though didn’t always succeed in preventing, were fading. I could look at myself in the mirror, and 90 percent truthfully say, “I like you.”
I wasn’t yet strong enough to throw away my razor. I hadn’t cut in some months. From time to time I would break down, and I would take it from its hiding place, even if to just hold it. There was something within me, some demon, that still had control over my desire to feel pain to know that I was, indeed, still breathing. When I would lose my temper, with I had through time and effort, started to hone in and control, I would break, and my skin would open to release the life’s blood that flowed in my veins, but it happened less and less frequently.
This most recent summer, I made a breakthrough; I found a way to manage the anger that had so long consumed and controlled me. When I lose control, and when I can’t feel anything but the burning rage underneath my skin and within my chest, I don’t take it out on myself any longer. I’ll instead run until I can’t feel my legs or lungs, or I bike until I can no longer move.
It still takes effort, but a month ago, I finally found it within myself to stand in front of the mirror and say, “I love you,” to myself. That same night, I talked with my best friend, and we made little jokes about our junior high days.
“I can’t believe that we did that,” she said, in reference to our black nail polish.
“Do you know what I can’t believe?” I asked her teasingly. “That you’re wearing pink.”
She looked at me, aghast. “Coming from you, Miss-All-I-Own-Is-Black-Because-It-Matches-My-Soul?” She waited until I was done laughing to continue. “Really though. We’ve come a long way.”
I smiled a real smile and looked at her, nodding. “Believe me. I know.”
It was true. I had come a long way. By this time, I hadn’t cut myself in a month and a half. Now it’s going on three months. I’ve had no urges to do so since that night when I realized I did love myself again, and my tick of scratching when under pressure has even faded into time. I feel confident about myself, who I am as a person, and where I will go with my life. I can look into the mirror, with a smile that I mean with every iota of my being and say, “I love you,” to my reflection.
It wasn’t until this summer, almost a full three years after I lost all control and stumbled into my gaping hole of self-hatred and depression, that I finally found the strength to throw my last razor. I hadn’t used it in almost two years (my keys had since replaced it), but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it. The thought of having to go through daily life without that lifeline there terrified me to my very core. In some twisted line of thought, it had become almost like a safety blanket to me, and I clung to it.
I don’t know exactly when or why I started to hate myself as much as I did. All I really know is that as I progressed through my later elementary years, I started to see myself in a different light, a light that I didn’t like. The insecurities I developed early due to bullying and naivety in life only flared, nearly crippling me with worry every day. I didn’t know how to keep more than one friend, and anyone I tried to get close to shied away for unspoken reasons after a month or two. I couldn’t see myself as a beautiful or even cute girl. All I saw in the mirror was a round faced, curly haired mess whose skin wouldn’t listen and whose body kept changing in stupid ways. I just saw a wannabe who kept hiding behind her “tough girl” attitude when really, she was just afraid to let people know her.
These worries only intensified as I entered junior high and merged with everyone in the district. That year, I lost more “friends” than I care to remember, and all for one silly reason – I didn’t fit into the “mold” that formed their clique. I had my first encounter with puppy love, and when it ended, he and his best friend made it their past time to torment me and make my life a living hell. By the end of my seventh grade year, my self image, my self satisfaction, and my self esteem were shattered and scattered across the world.
At this time, there’s one memory in particular that sticks out like a sore thumb in my mind. It was one of my good days, a day when I felt almost human. I was outside waiting for my bus with two of my buddies on that crisp early spring day. My hands were cold, but I could have cared less as I stood there and laughed with them, cajoling and smiling.
A smile is an easy enough thing to do. Most people will smile without a thought, without qualm. After less than a minute on this day, it physically hurt me to smile. Shocked by this revelation, I stopped. I fell into thought, trying frantically to remember when I had last smiled a real smile. Not a memory came to mind as I thought months and months into the past. When Abby and Becky noticed, they stopped laughing too, and asked what was that matter. I could only look at them, dumbfounded.
“It hurts to smile.”
They both sobered immediately and just looked at me, clearly unsure of what to say. Becky started to say something, but I had to interrupt her.
“Thank you.”
My trek down the road of self-mutilation started easily enough. In elementary school, I developed the habit of lightly scratching the palms of my hands and my inner arm when I was anxious or nervous. There were never any marks left, nor any redness created. It was just a weird tick. As my anxiety and nerves intensified, however, so did my tick. I started to leave marks when I scratched. I scratched harder and harder until I would leave marks all across my arms for days at a time. I would feel better afterward, calmer, and more at ease. The pain gave me something to focus on other than my insecurity.
At a time, I did pull a razor from my dad’s tool box in the garage. I tried to use it to cut deeper, to see more of the blood that pumped through my body, but the most I ever got was a little paper cut sort of wound. I couldn’t tolerate the pain of the sharp metal, so I just kept it hidden as a reminder of how to control everything. I started to wear long sleeves more often to cover the scratches and scabs, and started falling more and more into the “emo” style. This only served to add to the teasing and bullying. More than once I was called a cutter and an emo brat. People didn’t know how much their words were actually hurting and harming me or the others they threw the words so carelessly at.
With the combination of hormones, tried friendships, bullying, and tense relations at home, my already ferocious temper exploded. I couldn’t go a day without yelling at someone, without losing all semblance of control that I had. Eventually, my temper turned from flaring out and burning others to wrapping itself around me, tearing apart my insides and my sanity. I didn’t know how to cope with this knew sensation of having my anger trapped inside my chest, simmering, bubbling, boiling. Most of the time, I just waited until I could get home, where I would go and lie on my bed and bawl for an uncertain amount of time and create new injuries, new ways to feel the pain that somehow tied me to Earth.
The summer between my eighth grade year and my entrance into high school, everything I felt to that point, everything I worked toward avoiding, combined into a storm and broke over my head. Within that first week of summer, I got into a fight with my sister over something I have no memory of while two of my best friends sat at the table. I couldn’t calm down afterward, no matter how hard I tried. Eventually, I told my friends that they would be better off going home. They left without saying goodbye. Later that night, four of my other friends made a point of calling me a “selfish bitch”. By the end of the week, I lost everyone I thought I could trust. I never found out why, or what was said to make them feel that way. I was isolated from everyone but family, but even that changed.
Not even a week after the catastrophe of a sleep over , my grandmother, who I shared a room with for two years, and a home with for five, fell ill. She had to be taken to the hospital in the morning of June 3rd. I heard her calling for my mom for twenty minutes at the very least, and I ignored her because I didn’t want to take responsibility. She died three weeks later. I never got to apologize.
The rest of my summer I spent with my sister, grieving and moping about. I had no friends. I lost my grandma. My mom was lost in her own grief. Erika did as much as she could with me, but at the end of August, she moved into her dorm and left home, bound for college.
During this time, I scratched harder and deeper than ever before. I almost always broke skin and bled. It was also during this time that I felt most at control over my emotions, my body, and my life.
The thought of suicide crossed my mind more than once, and I one day even reached for one of the shotguns in the basement, but something always held me back, something beyond fear of the unknown. I don’t know what it was, but I’m thankful for it every time I think of how close I did come to ending my life.
My freshman year rolled around without any huge footnote in my life. By this time I had sunk so low into my line of thought, that most days, it was enough to pull myself out of bed and get my butt to school on time. My grades fell short of their normal A’s, and I could have cared less. I hated myself so much that the only reason that I still wanted to succeed in school was so I wouldn’t disappoint my parents more than I clearly already had. The only thing that truly mattered to me then, was that I was still here for some reason.
I had lessened up on the scratching, and only fell back into it when I was truly upset. It went from my to make it through the day to my coping mechanism to my destructive and volatile anger. Instead I would find ways to bruise myself. I would pinch myself, hit my head on walls, and at one point, I slammed a door on my hand and arm. My only connection to reality was pain.
I floated through the year, making friends and losing friends, succeeding in school and struggling with it, crawling to the surface, only to be pulled back in. In my mind, my low points became my “remissionary” points, and I tried to aim to make myself happy, no matter what. That only served to make me more miserable, unfortunately.
During this year, I became very self aware of what I was going through. I knew that I needed help, but I didn’t know how to get it. My fear kept me at bay from actively seeking it. I eventually gathered the courage to talk to my mom after weeks of coaxing from my then boyfriend. She sat down with me that night for three hours as I sobbed out my story from the last few years of my life. She told me I didn’t need to see anyone, but she would talk with me when I needed her. About six months after I first broke down and told her, sobbing, that I wanted to die, she looked at me in the hallways as tears streamed down my face, emotionless.
“Elise, I can’t do anything to help you.” This alone shocked me. She was the person I needed to talk to. I didn’t need her to help me. I just needed her to be there. She wasn’t done however. “You’re doing this to yourself. I can’t help but think that you want to make yourself this miserable. You don’t want to be happy. You want to have something to complain about. What you fail to see is that you have a good life. I don’t know why you’re wasting it away hating yourself.” With that, she turned to her room, and left me in the hallway, alone.
Her words were the hardest thing I have heard in my life. The thin relationship we had was shattered in that instant, and I haven’t been able to turn to her with my real worries in life since. Everything we have now is based around generalizations or politics.
It was spring when the last piece of straw broke my back, during my soccer season. I had a terrible coach that year. She made sport of it to humiliate me in front of my teammates and her fellow coaches. Anything I did wrong, she made a point to make a snide comment in front of the team. For any other person, she took them to one side. I couldn’t talk to her without her donning overly condescending attitude.
The one time she did offer a compliment, it was also a backhanded reprimand.
“You have a good long shot. By the way, don’t be late to practice again.”
That day was my first back from Florida for the band trip for the high school jazz band. Practice had been an hour early, and I had been completely unaware of the fact, despite having asked four or five people what time the practice was at. I had explained this to her when I arrived a half hour late.
She made me hate practice, games, and even the sport. I could do nothing without her being nasty and rude in return. Most days I left the field crying. It was then that I found I could cut without a razor. My keys sufficed in their place, biting through skin and letting my blood flow away from my veins as I sat in my car, crying, after practice. On almost a daily basis, I would tear my skin apart with the rough edges of my house key after practice, just to release what was bubbling beneath my skin, just to feel something.
I reached my absolute lowest at this time. Most days I hated even waking up, and I practically prayed at night to never again have to open my eyes for another day. I cut myself so often then that I became anemic. I was sick almost constantly. I even began to lose weight. No one took notice though, because I took care that no would ever find about my weakness, about my shame, about how much I hated myself.
I kept it secret for a reason – I didn’t want anyone to see who I really was, and how I really felt. I didn’t want to be sent away to get better. Most of all, I was terrified. Help hadn’t worked before, so why would it then? Who was to say they wouldn’t just say that I was making it all up too?
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I wasted time away, jumping between high points and low points so frequently that I became almost totally convinced that I was bipolar. In a single day, I might change my state of mind four to five times when years prior, it would take months to make the same leap. As the summer came to a close, my mood started to settle, and I only made a leap or two a day once I began classes again.
My sophomore year took much the same route as my freshman year, except I faced more highs than lows. Gradually, I started to see the world with a different light. I took an active stance against my depression. By the spring, when it finally rolled around, I saw not the chubby faced, curly haired, awkward girl of my elementary days, I saw not the sullen, heavily made-up, angry glare of my junior high years, nor saw I the apathetic, blank eyed, sullen cheeked, pale girl from a year ago. I had vibrance now, and I glowed with health. I had grown into my body, away from my awkwardness. The scars that I took care to make sure never formed, though didn’t always succeed in preventing, were fading. I could look at myself in the mirror, and 90 percent truthfully say, “I like you.”
I wasn’t yet strong enough to throw away my razor. I hadn’t cut in some months. From time to time I would break down, and I would take it from its hiding place, even if to just hold it. There was something within me, some demon, that still had control over my desire to feel pain to know that I was, indeed, still breathing. When I would lose my temper, with I had through time and effort, started to hone in and control, I would break, and my skin would open to release the life’s blood that flowed in my veins, but it happened less and less frequently.
This most recent summer, I made a breakthrough; I found a way to manage the anger that had so long consumed and controlled me. When I lose control, and when I can’t feel anything but the burning rage underneath my skin and within my chest, I don’t take it out on myself any longer. I’ll instead run until I can’t feel my legs or lungs, or I bike until I can no longer move.
It still takes effort, but a month ago, I finally found it within myself to stand in front of the mirror and say, “I love you,” to myself. That same night, I talked with my best friend, and we made little jokes about our junior high days.
“I can’t believe that we did that,” she said, in reference to our black nail polish.
“Do you know what I can’t believe?” I asked her teasingly. “That you’re wearing pink.”
She looked at me, aghast. “Coming from you, Miss-All-I-Own-Is-Black-Because-It-Matches-My-Soul?” She waited until I was done laughing to continue. “Really though. We’ve come a long way.”
I smiled a real smile and looked at her, nodding. “Believe me. I know.”
It was true. I had come a long way. By this time, I hadn’t cut myself in a month and a half. Now it’s going on three months. I’ve had no urges to do so since that night when I realized I did love myself again, and my tick of scratching when under pressure has even faded into time. I feel confident about myself, who I am as a person, and where I will go with my life. I can look into the mirror, with a smile that I mean with every iota of my being and say, “I love you,” to my reflection.