I kept cutting, because it worked. When I cut, I felt better for a while. When I cut, my life no longer overwhelmed me. I felt too keenly the thread of chaos, of how things can get away from you in a thousand ways. Bodies expand, grades plummet, pets die, paint peels, ice caps melt, genocide erupts. Entropy keeps eating at the ramparts, and I cut to shore them up. I cut to lay down a line between before and after, between self and other, chaos and clarity. I cut as an affirmation of hope, saying, I have drawn the line and I am still on this side of it.
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 »
The fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.
I let the razor's edge kiss the pale skin near my left elbow, and then drew it slowly - so slowly that I could feel through the blade the faintest tug of resistance and the sudden giving way of the flesh - along my arm. There was a very fine, an elegant pain, hardly a pain at all, like the swift and fleeting burn of a drop of hot candle wax. In the razor's wake, the skin melted away, parted to show briefly the milky white subcutaneous layers before a thin, beaded line of rich crimson blood seeped through the inch-long divide. Then the blood welled up and began to distort the pure, stark edges of my delicately wrought wound.
The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh.
My name is Gabrielle and I am twenty-eight years old. I began to self-injure at age fifteen -- so nearly thirteen years -- minus a two year period. This website was made to let self-injurers know that they are not alone and to help their friends and family learn more about self-injury and how it affects their loved one.
