How many cuts could I count? How many could I place in time and context? I had to admit that I couldn’t remember the occasion of almost any of them, their catalysts, whether epic or mundane, completely obscured by time. So many moments of supposedly unendurable pain, now utterly forgotten. You start to think, Maybe I don’t need this anymore. Maybe I never did.
I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting; that’s the plain and inelegant truth. No matter how compelling the urge, the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the urge, but the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the flood tide of emotions that drove me to that brink, but I had the power to decide whether or not to step over. Eventually I decided not to. Read more »
"When I’m dying to pick up a razor blade—like it is so far in my body that I can taste it I want to do it so bad—if I set through one of those times without doing it, then I get the strength to say, ‘Remember you got through that time without it.’"
So climb walls,
Thin my blood now
And I crawl, back to bed now
What the hell, gotta rest
Aching pain in my chest
Lucky me, now I'm set
Little bug for a pet
New Orleans, gotta get
Pin cushion medicine
Used to be curious
Now the shit's sustenance
So come bite the apple
I'm run down
Like Sodom to Gomorrah, all dead now
So please stop to laugh, and pity me
My soul means well, but I'm sorry
My skin it is weathered and I'm nervous, yes I am
My future was in my hands till I washed it all away
Washed it all away
Let me start again, here,
where a woman ends.
The wrists were involved.
Also the leg-tops, the delicate skin
of the inner arms,
anywhere she could drag a sharpness
that factors in and out
what she could not change in her life
which was pain.
The steel ratio of pain
to power
being control.
VII
Now ask yourself, as I did,
why hurt yourself more?
