Created By
Rate this Story
Embed
|
+
3
|
Nailed by a Stud |
|
+
3
|
I cut myself, because it feels GOOD. |
|
+
2
|
My Self-Harm Story |
|
+
5
|
Hop, Skip and... Jump |
|
+
1
|
Being Followed |
|
+
7
|
Too Late. |
|
I cut myself, because it feels GOOD.
Tragedy
 Created on 10-5-08
 Views(35)
 Story Rating G
|
I started self-harming when I was fourteen. I don’t know what triggered it really; I had read a lot about it in magazines and stuff. There was never any given moment when I thought “Oh, let’s try cutting myself, see if that helps the pain.” It never went like that. I don’t think it ever does – no one chooses to self-harm, it just ‘happens’.
Anyway, I was fourteen and in my third year of school, and by this time I was also in my second International School. I left my first one after my second year because I couldn’t take the bullying and crap that I got from people there. I’ve always been bullied about being overweight, as long as I can remember. I was verbally bullied at school itself, but I was also cyber-bullied, through MSN and MySpace.
The second school was better for the first couple of months. I got on with people, I made friends, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I actually belonged somewhere. So you can imagine how I felt when things began to fall apart. I had moved schools at the same time as another boy, who had attended my last school with me. He began spreading rumors about me, and telling people about the stuff that went on at my last school. The boys in particular picked up on this, and enjoyed taking the piss out of me and being downright cruel. The friends I had made in the beginning began to stop talking to me, afraid that they would be targeted as well. I ended up having no one to talk to, and being, once again, alone. I got heavily involved in drama and the school play, and that helped me to ignore what was going on. However, the situation began eating away at me, and I was getting more and more frightened about coming to school each morning. I actually felt physically sick every morning on the train to school.
As I said before, I don’t know what triggered it, it just happened. I’d had a particularly bad day at school, and I found myself absent-mindedly scratching my arm with my nail. It provided a comfort I hadn’t felt before, and made me feel in control of what was going on. I never used razor blades - it's stupid, but they're too quick and clean. I like it to hurt, that's the only way it goes numb. Every time I cut myself, I felt that I had control over the pain, I could control how much or how little I felt. I ceased to feel any sort of existence, I only felt alive when I self-harmed.
When I returned to that school in year four, the summer holidays seemed to have given everyone the break they needed. Most of the people who had bullied me the previous year had left, and I felt OK. I even managed to stop self-harming. Until I made friends with Leonie. She was in my year, and somehow we connected. We both subconsciously knew that we self-harmed, and that, I think, bought us together. Her cousin had committed suicide in the summer, and she coped with that by self-harming. We shared our thoughts on self-harm and suicide, and this helped us. I still hadn’t 'relapsed', and I felt OK. However, in November that year, I started the slow and painful roll downhill again.
The problem was that I lived about 20km north of the school, and it took me about an hour to get there every morning. The school was relocating to a new site, and this was going to be on the other side of the city, which would have meant another hour’s traveling time for me. Basically in the end we had no choice but to move me to a different school. So guess what, I ended up in Hilversum.
The thought of having to move schools again tormented me, and I was extremely reluctant to go. Leonie was a good friend, and I started self-harming again because I was so upset about things. I was frightened about having to start again, having to make new friends. I didn’t want to move because I had actually begun to like the school I was in, and I felt like I had friends. The self-harming got steadily worse – from a few times a week to whenever I wasn’t doing something else. It took different forms as well. Mostly I would cut myself, but I also had the tendency to take 5 or 6 painkillers at once to numb the pain I felt. I still do this, as it’s not outwardly noticeable, and it helps relieve the pain.
At this time, like myself, Leonie was also suffering from depression. She talked about killing herself, and it made me wonder too. Would anyone care if I died? Would the world be a better place? Should I even exist in the first place? These were the kind of questions I asked myself, and Leonie and I glorified the idea, as it were.
I finally faced up to the fact that I was moving schools, and I tried to make my last few months of school the best ones of the two years. And I succeeded, they were good times, and I was happy. I left the school, determined to make a fresh start in Hilversum. I’m not going to lie, the summer was very hard for me, and I was having sleeping problems because I was so frightened about starting a new school again. I thought I was going to pass out with nerves on my first day, but it was okay. The entire first year wasn’t too bad, and I withheld from self-harming. With the exceptions of a few people, the year went fairly smoothly, and although I sometimes had the urge to self-harm, I didn’t give in. Again, I got heavily involved with the school play and drama, and this distracted me from anything else.
When I started DP1, I was actually looking forward to going back after the summer. Two good friends of mine had left, so that made the first few weeks hard – it felt very strange without them, especially as I had shared a lot of what I felt with one of them. But I got on with it, and I had other friends to hang around with. Things started to go wrong around October time, when I fell out with a group of friends, because of various reasons. We were due to attend a conference together, and so I tried to sort things out before we went. After all, spending a week with people you hate is very trying. It sort of worked – we were able to be civil to each other, and we got OK, even for the first few days of the conference.
What happened then is still sort of a blur, but to cut a long story short, on the third evening in Berlin, we were all very tired and tempers started flaring, resulting in several insulting remarks and some very hurt individuals. Being the person I am, I didn't want things to escalate so I tried to leave the situation, and I spent the evening with another group of people who I got on with. Returning to the Youth Hostel after an evening with them made me feel ill and scared. We sat down in the bar area, and I was really drawn into myself. I was so preoccupied with the events earlier that evening, that I couldn't talk to anyone else, and I simply sat there, not looking or talking to anyone. When the teachers came back, the one I trusted the most - my geography teacher - told me that I isolated myself from the rest, and that it was my fault, pretty much. I asked whether she would hang out with people who called her a fat bitch, and she made excuses, saying her friends would never have said that to her. Trying to point out that I simply isolated myself when they had bitched at me, she told be she 'didn't believe the twins had called me a fat bitch'. The person I trusted the most. She then went on to say “Well I suggest you find some new friends then when we get back”. My world crumbled on me then. I felt like I had lost everyone I trusted, and that I couldn’t turn to anyone about anything. I felt the most alone I had ever felt, and the urge to cut myself that had been biting at me for the past few months suddenly overwhelmed me. I couldn’t go back into the room with the people who had bitched at me, it was eleven at night, I was in a strange city with no where to go, no one to turn to. I flipped totally over the edge and cut myself for the first time in a year. It felt SO GOOD, such a RELIEF.
The next day was worse, in a way. I wished I could just die. I wrote a letter, and I stood on the metro station platform, actually considering throwing myself infront of the train. No jokes, I was all for doing it. I don't know why I didn't. I was so scared.
Being winter, I was suffering more from depression. I felt alone again when we returned to school, and I continued my self-harming stint. I hadn’t realised anyone actually noticed the change until I was ‘asked’ to discuss my ‘problems’. It took me over three months to come clean to the counselor about my self-harming, and when I did, I was deemed ‘too screwed up’, and was passed on to a ‘professional’. I hated the shift, I still felt I couldn’t trust anyone, but this last counselor turned out to be amazing. I managed to stop self-harming in April 2008, and except for a few urges and some minor cutting incidents, I’ve not had any relapses.
She showed me that there are other ways of dealing with depression, and I often find myself writing poetry and songs, because that’s what I enjoy, and it’s something I can channel my depression into. I also have a love for acting, and just being able to do a bit of acting or drama often helps me, because it gives me something else to concentrate on, and I don’t have to be me – I can be someone else.
If you asked me today why I did it, I’d most likely say “I don’t know”. Because I don’t, I can’t pin-point my motives, I can’t say that I wanted to kill myself because of x, y and z. That’s not how it works, it’s never that simple. Obviously, I regret it, and I don’t want to go back to the state I was in, but I’ll never say that I’ll never go back to self-harming, because that’s not a prediction I feel I can make.
Comments
Please Login to post comments| On October 6th 2008 Ashlev2008 Said : | |
|
Taking a lot of pain killers is a way of self harm???? |
