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I love life. I am fun, energetic, outgoing, sporty, I love doing things with my friends and I love my fiance. I have wonderful parents, wonderful brothers and sisters, wealth, I grew up in a large house with a beautiful yard and so much opportunity.

But I cut. I have depression, it's a chemical imbalance in my body. It bothers me when people say "I shouldn't be depressed, I have a great life" because depression isn't choice. I cut because I get pleasure, release, and calm from it. I have depression because I was born with it. I want people to be aware of the fact that you don't have to have a terrible life to be depressed, you don't have to feel guilty for being depressed if you have a good life.

My story:

I started cutting in tenth grade, but that was just an experimental stage. I was in theatre and someone I didn't get along with in 9th grade and was walking on the stage near me, alone. I don't know how we got into this conversation, but I remember he was talking about cutting himseld. I was horrified and tried to talk him out of it, and that's how we became best friends. However, the idea stuck itself in my head and I took a hard plastic pen cap one night and started scratching myself. I also did it with a serrated kitchen knife a few weeks later. He caught me, both times. He helped me through that stage but eventually told the school, who told my parents, who asked me about it and I denied it.

The school sent me to therapy. Forced me. I think that my parents believed me, but I did lie. I did cut, but not in the conventional sense. The cut I made with the kitchen knife gave me quite a scar on my wrist that I constantly use to remind myself of how lucky I am and what I have, now. Before I met my now fiance, I used it as a sort of reminder of my life. I would look at it in a negative way. It was a reminder of how I felt that time,, how angry and depressed I was. Now it serves as a reminder of how happy I am now, even though I still do it. I got addicted to cutting because of the high, the thrill, and the relief of stress, anger, and emotional pain it gives me. When I look at that scar, I smile instead of frown. It makes me think of what I got through that year, when my parents almost divorced and my depression got the best of me. I learned how to control my anger and frustrations, even though it was hurting myself that did it.

The therapy was terrible. I've been forced into therapy my entire life and I always hated it. Whenever I walk into that room I feel like I'm being stripped naked. I always refused to give them details about my life because that's private information, that's for my closest friends. I do believe that therapy works for a lot of people, it just doesn't for me. I'm too private, too proud, and if anything, the therapy did more damage. It did no good. It made me more defensive and more closed. Needless to say, my friendship with that friend dwindled. We had a fight the next year and he wrote me off as a friend, even though I did nothing to him that year. I did an awful lot to him in the year we were friends though, I know that and I'll always feel guilty for it - I'd call him, tell him when I felt like cutting, I'd call him crying sometimes, and he'd always pull up my sleeve to see if I'd done it. I put a LOT of stress on him, way too much for him to bear, so I don't blame him for going to the school to get me help because he thought he was doing the right thing, I was just the wrong person to do that to. Like I said, therapy doesn't work for me. So that next year, we didn't talk to each other. He hurt me so deeply, and said during that fight that he didn't want a repeat of last year. I didn't cut though, I didn't even think about it. I have no idea why, I just didn't.

I finished high school just saying quick hello's to him and him to me (we made up sort of, but it wasn't what it was before), and went our separate ways. My next bout was in my sophomore year of college. That's when it got really bad. It wasn’t just because of a guy, but he was the trigger. It was because of him, my friend who did something terrible to me, betrayed and burned me pretty badly, and I have not been friends with her since – that’s a story for another day – I was under a lot of stress from my classes, etc. But mostly, it was because of the guy. I felt so alone, so hopeless, and I thought back to when I cut in high school. One night I took a paper clip that had a jagged end and pulled it across my left arm near my elbow. It felt so good to let out my anger and depression. It hurt a little but it wasn’t a bad kind of pain. This is coming from someone who has a phobia of pain. The few people who know me and what I used to do (only one knows I still do it) don’t understand why I did it because of my phobia. I don’t, either, but then again, I see and feel it as a different kind of pain. I was thrown into the worst bout of depression I've had to this day. I lost my appetite and had to force myself to eat; I was barely eating for 5 weeks, so little that my stomach eventually started eating itself. It hurt so much that the friends I had around me took me to the diner and bought me my food and made me eat it. I just wasn't hungry; it wasn't anorexia. My roommate, who is one of my best friends now and became a best friend after we decided to room together, didn't know and still doesn't know about the cutting but she knew about the eating, or not eating. I also told her, and asked her to remind me to eat. She was so good about it; she'd take me to lunch and dinner with her every day, she'd grab snacks with the extra money she had on her meal swipe and give them to me between meals and at night if we stayed up late, she helped me through it and i'll never ever forget that. I love her to pieces.

During that bout, I cut a lot more than I did in high school, and deeper, though not as deep as that one time I did it with the kitchen knife. Only one of the cuts I made left a scar only I can find, it's so small and thin. I think I cut for about 1 and a half months, my longest. The only reason I stopped was because spring and summer were coming soon and there would be no way to hide my arms from my parents when we went away on vacation.

That next semester, fall 2007, I hadn't even the chance to think about it. I met someone who blew everything out of the water - my now fiance. I told him very early on what the scars on my arms were from, and I promised him I wouldn't do it again. However, 2 years later I was in his kitchen and I couldn’t open a box of tea – the plastic. So I took a knife from his drawer and I sliced it open. I noticed the blade was a little loose so I took a look at it – and it all came rushing back to me. The feelings, the urge and want to cut. I wanted to see if I still felt the same, I wanted to see if I had gotten over it. So I pressed the point to the skin on my hand beneath my thumb and I felt an intense rush of adrenaline. I got scared, freaked out, and put the knife back. I ran to him and told him everything. He held me for half an hour and I told him how scared I was that I would slip one day and hurt him, that I think I made a promise to him that I can’t keep.

During that year I met someone who would drastically change my life. She's one of my best friends now. She had a terrible, traumatic experience as a child but started cutting even before that. That experience just enhanced it. We clicked right away. We told each other we used to cut; her before me. I don't tell people I used to do that, or that I currently do, unless they tell me they did or do. She hadn't been at the time, and I tried so hard to keep it that way. I even got her a little gift for her 3 year mark of not cutting. In the last almost three years, she and I have gone through as much I think as people usually would in 5 or 6 years, maybe more. She's helped me a lot and I will be modest and say I only hope I've helped her. We both started cutting again after we met each other, though I don't think it was the product of being around someone else who used to cut. She's the only person I can talk openly to about self harm. We are even writing a book about it.

Since then, I had been self harming but not enough and not with something sharp enough to cut my skin. 2 years later (present time) and I'm living in Rhode Island. He lived with me here for a year and when I found tobacco in his jeans pocket, finding out he broke HIS promise to me that he wouldn't smoke tobacco, I had a long talk with him about how why should I keep my promise if he can't kepe his. But that didn't stop him. I got into real cutting again. It's been on and off for the past year and a half but more so, recently. He's not here anymore, he went back to school and lives there on campus, so it's much easier for me to get away with it.

I do it for control, pleasure, and release, all different reasons for different emotions at different times. I dont' do it often, but more often than I'd like. I'd like to not want to do it, I could stop, but I think trying to stop makes me want to do it more. So I let myself do it and I hide it well, and I think it will phase out just as my other bouts have. It is destructive but it's not as bad as smoking or drinking or doing drugs. Those affect your health long term, self harm just gives you scars. I'd much rather do that than destroy my insides.

So that's my story. My hope is to help other people get through it, or at least understand it. Yes I still do it, but I know people can stop. I've seen it happen.