I have to write once more for this blog for my grade. I’m highly motivated by grades, so despite feeling as though I have nothing to say, here I am, typing. I thought maybe I’d write about how we adjust to our unique bodily abnormalities (I don’t love this word, but I’m at a loss for another). I thought about sharing my husband’s experience of processing the bodies of fallen soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the forced emotional detachment he took on as body after body found its way on a table before him, waiting to be readied to head home in a plain wooden box, back to the states and no doubt a family that would never recover their loss. I thought about sharing the moment my friend, whose son died an hour after birth, told me she can’t bear to hold sleeping babies because it feels too much like holding a dead baby, and how that statement, so matter-of-fact for her, knocked the wind out of me and ripped a hole in my heart for her, right beside the one that grew as her belly swelled with the baby we both knew wouldn’t survive. Somehow, none of these felt like things I wanted to share. And as I stared at the screen, thinking, “I have nothing to say,” I recalled (with the help of some online diary entries) a time in my life when I had the reverse problem: so, so much to say, and no one to listen. And I knew. Despite how very little (very, very little) I want to share this story about myself, I need to. I owe it to my own slow recovery, the future of my children, and the potential readers who’ve maybe been here too. So, here we go.

*Deep breath* *Deep breath*

I don’t generally ascribe labels to myself (they are relentlessly negative), but most people who know feel comfortable placing “emotional” over my picture. It’s a fair assessment. As long as I can remember, I’ve been an emotional girl/woman. I cry a lot, sometimes for justified reasons (see above), sometimes because I’m easily overwhelmed by emotions. I hurt a lot, and for me, emotional pain is easily manifested physically. In times I’ve had my heart broken, I have felt an ache in my chest that made it hard to breathe. It is this essential truth about me that led me down the path of self-injury. And this truth that kept me under its weight for over 10 years. If you need a trigger warning, consider yourself warned. There won’t be images, but this will probably hurt. 

When I was thirteen, I cut myself for the very first time. My life up until then had been relatively standard fare. My parents are divorced; I’m the third of four daughters and fall quite effortlessly into everything you’ve ever heard about middle children. Adulthood has given me the hindsight to see how my own understanding of my experiences were skewed by the hormones of not just me, but my sisters (and mother) as well. When I was a teenager, I always compared myself to my sisters, and with the gift of observation, I saw a lot of things that I don’t think others did. My sisters were a lot of things: clever, smart, charming, manipulative, athletic, witty, sweet, and determined. It left little, if any, room for me. I did not shine. I was the chubbiest, the quietest, and the most “emotional”. I read at the dinner table and preferred to be in my room. I do not doubt that how I remember that time is different from how others actually saw me, but perception is key. No matter what I did, I did not stand out. While I was earning top grades and awards for middle school papers at school, at home I felt invisible. I don’t remember the “why” of the first time, but I remember what came next: release. Without thinking, I had found a way to lessen the feelings I kept bottled up, a way to relieve the pressure of invisibility.

High school was probably ordinary as well. There wasn’t anything exceptionally traumatic about my daily life. I was fed, my family had money, and I had friends. But I still felt invisible. No one read the school paper I created. No one attended the field hockey games I played in. No one noticed what I felt was so incredibly obvious: that every day, no matter how much I smiled, I was in pain. Because every day, I suppressed my feelings. I knew no one wanted to listen, and if I ever questioned that they might, I would be reminded with “not now” and “I don’t care.” I just stopped telling people how I felt. When I was consumed with the teenage angst of being not thin enough or not pretty enough, I squashed it down inside me. When my relatives told me I was sensitive, or to grow up, or that I’d be prettier if I lost weight, I buried it. When boys at school touched me, or pushed me against the lockers with their bodies and whispered filth in my ear, I kept it to myself. And when the pressure of everything I never shared began to build, I would feel it, physically. My body would tense and I would be agitated, sometimes even itch with desire to spill the words of so much hurt on the floor like a shaken bottle of carbonated pressure. And I always tried, I tried to share with words first, but no one was there to listen. No one ever wanted to hear.

“Ashley, I really don’t care right now.”

Those words, those were always the last to pile onto the weight before I sank beneath it. Tight and tense and afraid, I’d pace my room, trying not to cry, trying not to scream, trying not to lash out with every fiber of my being at the people just two doors down who didn’t have time, who never had ears for me. And it was always the blade that saved me. With trembling hands and a tear-stained face, frantic breath and pounding pulse I would retrieve the metal that I knew would be my salvation. I should have been afraid but I wasn’t; I should have been concerned but I wasn’t. Deep inside of me, beneath the heap of anger and fear and pain and sadness I would beg and beg for someone to see me, for anyone to hear me, for them to know, to wake up and realize that I was dying beneath the weight of feelings I could never get out from under. But the weight, it dragged me down

and down

and down

until I felt like I would never breathe again, never see sunlight, never laugh. I pressed the blade into my skin, uninhibited because I knew release waited for me and I ran into the arms of that stinging pain like I wanted to run to the arms of my mother. It never hurt like I thought it would and the blood never frightened me like I thought it should. Through wet eyes I would look at the bright red pulsing from me and with it I knew, I could just feel the secrets and pain seep out of me. Often once wasn’t enough, like trying to fill a cup with the faucet on a drip and I’d drag the blade over my skin again again again.

And it slowed. My heart slowed, the tears slowed, the pressure escaped me like a balloon deflating. I let the red run until it wouldn’t, listening to my own pain escape my body through aggravated lesions I’d made myself, whispers floating into nothing, never finding listening ears. And I was okay. I just laid there, so tired from the build and release, of accomplishment, my body consumed with an ache like the soreness you get from a workout. I just breathed. I just was. I was okay.

When I was 16, after over three years of hiding my arms under long sleeves or saying my cats were ruthless monsters, I told my dad in a moment of bravery over dinner. I think maybe it was easier because I almost never saw him, and I was sure he didn’t care, so I could trust he wouldn’t be angry. He wasn’t. He wasn’t afraid either, at least, not for me. He was afraid for himself, that he wouldn’t be able to navigate the waters of teenage girlhood I had been drowning in to see me to shore unscathed (or no more scarred at least than I already was). He told my mom. She was, “disappointed”. I was a disappointment. She put me on antidepressants and made me roll up my sleeves once a month. My sister tried to kill herself, and any attention I was getting was ripped away. I was invisible again. So it continued. And the build was shorter. It happened more often, usually tied to events that were more than I could hold on my own. The time my high school boyfriend forced me to give him oral sex; the times I was assaulted at work; the time my stepdad told me to stop scratching myself… I was a sinking stone.

I thought maybe separation from my family and the love of a good man would save me. It didn’t. He was gone a lot, and I was not a grown up. No one had given me the tools to navigate my feelings, and my feelings were becoming more adult than I could handle. There was only one way I knew of to turn off the chatter of pain and fear. It was my crutch, and I couldn’t survive without it. I was destructive, I was destroyed, I was invisible. No one saw the torn, worn girl. No one saw me drowning. And when I began using drugs to slow the build before I boiled over, no one saw that either. When I wasn’t high, I would reel from the pain of my own failures, the disgust I felt that I had become a loser who drank and did drugs and slept with strangers. When sex made me feel dirty and used, I would cry in the shower until I couldn’t, never clean enough, never whole enough, and always to full of pain and hate. My heart would ache from the burden of what I felt and I would sob in a ball and pray that this time, this time I would just cry. This time I would only scream. This time I would make fists that refused to surrender to call of steel, ignore the tingling of my skin as it anticipated the searing of being forcibly opened, reject the release that I knew would come after. And I never won. Always, I found myself alone, on the floor, cried out and aching, head just above water, yearning for a solace that would never come, breathing with what energy I had left, rubbed raw from my own decisions and remorse. I was consumed by a cycle of pain and self-loathing, devastating pressure, unrelenting need for release.

Even today, I can’t remember how I survived. There was never a time I considered suicide; I was a hopeless romantic who believed in the power of new days, the significance of dawn. I think I woke up one morning and just looked in the mirror at what was left of me. I was scarred, over and over again puffy white and pink lashes streaked my arms, shoulders, hands, legs. They crossed and overlapped, touched and made shapes. I looked tired. I looked empty. I was empty. I had bled all the hurt I could, but I had never faced it. I sought resolution in that new day with the clarity that follows sweet release. I was afraid. I was afraid that I would never be able to feel whole. I was afraid I would never be able to unlink my body and my feelings, that I would never be able to carry emotional pain without my fingers instinctually curling around a blade. I was afraid that crying would never be enough. But I did not want to be numb anymore. I was not this girl. I could not continue to drown. These scars were not all there was to me, this armor of pain was not what I wanted people to see. I was not this girl. Early morning light is the harshest. It never lies. I was not this girl. I would not be numb. I would learn to swim. I was not this girl.

I was not this girl.

I am not this girl.