Part 8 - Cutting

"Thank You For The Venom" - My Chemical Romance

I started self-harming when I was fourteen. One day, I just picked up a razor, and that was it.
At first it began, because I was so angry. I was angry because I was unhappy, and I didn’t know why. Therefore I would cut, which would make me feel more unhappy, and I would then be angry, and because I was angry, I would cut.

It would make me feel better for a short while, but then I would feel horrible again, usually due to something relatively insignificant, and I’d then want to do it again. I spoke to my Mother about it, and told her this was the reason I wanted to continue therapy. However, I was very good at hiding the evidence of my activities, so eventually she believed that I no longer self-harmed, and I let her believe this, and just got more devious with my habit. Because after a while, that’s what it became. It was all interwoven with my thought patterns, and because I found a little release, I continued. I was a child having to deal with very adult emotions, and because I was yet to learn the "tools" of how to handle these emotions, I turned to something incredibly self-destructive, because it made me feel ever so slightly better. At least with self-harm I had some level of control. Depression often takes away a lot of control of every day life. Part of learning to accept and manage the disease, is gaining some of that control back. Like an inner war.

Self-harming is never the way to gain control of depression. I know that, now that I do have the necessary emotional devices required to manage the symptoms and effects of my illness. But at the time, it felt like it was my only option. And, after a while, the brief period of relief that cutting can provide, can become almost addictive. I will however, carry the scars (literal scars) of this addiction for the rest of my life; something I don’t try to hide, but can often lead to awkwardness when they are initially noticed.

It took my an amazing amount of determination and perseverance to cease cutting, which I finally did at the age of nineteen. It was incredibly hard to stop, as during my illness, this had become the instinctive way to cope with the draining emotions that made me feel so horrible all the time. With age, I have learnt better, less destructive ways to handle my emotions, but that little thought is still there, at the back of my mind, and can raise it’s head at the most surprising of times. Luckily, these days it is only a passing thought that I can see for the depression related thought it is. But all this was way in the future at the time, and I never truly believed that I would stop feeling so awful all the time.

I didn’t just cut. It was around this time that I started binging and purging. I didn’t see this as a symptom of bulimia, as it was not in any way related to my image of my weight. I was very slim when I was younger. It was, as I saw it, a further way to hurt myself, and became part of my reaction to, and behaviours, of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (O.C.D.), which had been born from the "umbrella" mental illness of depression.

Depression often leads to O.C.D. as, due to instability of the chemicals in the brain, you loose a certain element of control in your life, that then manifests itself in other irrational O.C.D. mannerisms. These issues were further escalated when "IT" happened.