i gotta tell my story cause everyone's gotta tell there story, but one never really feels like theirs is worth telling. i'll tell you now that my story does not contain abuse. i suppose it does contain the invalidation that self injurers are supposed to have had, but that's hard to articulate. my story is what it is. consider that my disclaimer.

my story begins in November of 1995 at which time i was but thirteen years of age. i could say something cheesy like "that's when i first descended into darkness" but anyway, that's when i first remember feeling depressed. i can't remember a time in my life when i was happy, but all of a sudden i was feeling worse and feeling bad et cetera.

not to go into too much detail, but for the first time i sort of downward spiralled. in may i first thought about killing myself. (would be nice but not really an option) and in june i cut myself for the first time. i think i barely broke the skin with my dull old pocket knife.

at first i cut about two or three times a month, more or less depending on what kind of month i had. i was strictly a shallow cutter. i continued to feel really really bad. i've never actually been diagnosed with something, but man was i depressed. november 1996 - february 1997 were among my darkest monthes.

in january of 97 i fell in with a boy who, and man was this healthy, managed to convince me that depression was just in my head (well yes...) that it was a weakness, that i could will myself out of it, that i should will myself out of it, that i should just not let myself feel that way. because i liked him very very much i did just that. or i tried to. i took me awhile, but by march i had myself convinced that i was happy as a clam. looking back i really really wasn't...

in february of 97 i gave up SI. this came after i cut myself kind of deeply (not really at all, but it was enough to scare me). i would proceed to go without SI for seven monthes. the way i remember it, i didn't even think about it during those monthes i just...well, afterall, i was "happy"

during those happy monthes i went sort of nuts. i talked to myself all the time and i couldn't concentrate or be coherent much. but damn was i happy. yeah, right. i don't know. he wanted me to be happy so i was happy. proof positive that no matter how badly you want too, you can't be something you're not. you can just put on a damn good act.

when i went back to school in august of 97 i realized how overwhelmingly happy i wasn't. i went back to school expecting a rose garden which i sort of felt he'd promised me cause i was so damn happy and it concpicuously wasn't there. and i september i thought about SI for the first time in awhile and went right to it.

that was my sophomore year in highschool and it was...ok. i was pretty depressed but not as badly as i'd been in the past. for the first time i had the experience of crying non stop at school. i discovered to my amazement that you can cry in the middle of a class and very few people will notice or let on. for the first semester of my sophomore year i SIed at my old rate of 2 or 3 times a month more or less. for the second semester i only SIed about once a month.

in December of 97 i was in a play for which i had to wear an above the knee dress and hose. i had new cuts just below my knee and when i was sitting in the dressing room with a big group of people someone noticed them. i replied to "what happened?" with "i was trying to cut my leg off" never dreaming that anyone would not take it as a joke. well, they took it as SI. one of my friends had had a stint with SI the previous year (a brief stint) which had brought it to the knowledge of our general group. so when this whole issue of the cuts on my leg cut up i was given many troubled looks. the next day someone who had not been there said something to the affect of "i'm worried about you. friend X said you had cuts on your leg" to which i replied "yeah, so?" no one ever said another word about it. i take this as proof positive that my friends don't care about me (which is grossly unfair)

it was after my sophomore year that things got bad again. first they got as bad as the winter of my freshmen year, and then they got worse. starting in July (this would be of 98) after my sophomore year, i became overwelmed with willings of worthlessness. i had nothing but time on my hands and that didn't help. i just felt really really bad. not like i deserved to live, not like i wanted to live, not like anything. just really really bad. i started SIing two to four times a week, more or less. and i was cutting deeper then before. deep enough to scar for the first time ever. (i have only two or three scars from the two years or so before last summer. since then i've become covered.)

in august of 1998 i "discovered" burning myself with a cigarette lighter. i don't smoke, but this lighter belonging to my (ex?) best friends mother has been on my dresser for a long long time. on night i just saw it and is just lit it and i just let it heat up for a little while...i only burned myself for about two monthes because i don't really like fire much and i just couldn't handle it well. i have maybe thirty-six A shaped burn scars, but i really shouldn't be saying that...

at one point in august of that year i SIed every day for thirteen days straight. this was a lot for me. i broke the streak on the day i (finally) passed my drivers test, but the next day i went back to school and it started all over again. and so i continued to go around and around with issues of self hatred and lonliness and self injury et cetera.

when i self injured a few times a month i didn't have to think about self injury much. it was just a thing that i did when i felt like it. i didn't have to think about should i quit. why should i quit? i just never thought about it at all. but when i got to the point that i was self injuring a few times a week it became much more of an issue to me. i hit extremes with it. half the time i was abhorently ashamed of it, i detested it, and i want to quit more then all the world so that i could rid myself of such and ungodly burden, of this wall between me and the rest of the world. and the other half i didn't see any reason why i should quit when it was helping me and it wasn't doing any REAL harm. the fact that no one knew about it made it easier to say "why quit?"

so in all this back and forthness, in November of 1998, i tried to quit. i made it four days. shortly there after i made it twenty-five days. shortly there after i made it seventeen days. then, on Christmas day in 1998...i resolved to quit forever. each and every time i quit i had nasty withdrawal, started to feel kind of oddly healthy, then had a nasty day or a nasty night and caved. as for quitting on christmas. well, i caved in march of 99 which was about a month ago so essentially that brings me to today...i wish this story had more closure. the last little chapter to it was that maybe two weeks ago i set aside the pocket knife and discovered razor blades. astounding how much more damage there is to be done. *sigh*

in the end it is impossible for me to communicate all that i think and feel about self injury, or even most of it, or to some extent, even some of it. the thing that astounds me when i think about it is how alone i feel as a self injurer and yet how many times i've encountered it in my tiny little community (and yet still gone on feeling alone and letting them feel alone.) i had been self injuring monthes before (and monthes after) the above mentioned friend with the brief stint. i know she felt so alone and so did i, but i never said a word to her about it. i had another friend with a monstrous scab on her elbow who told me that she done it to herself with her finger nail one night when she felt really bad. and i said oh. a close friend of mine dated a guy who self injured. i watched her become disgusted with him as she learned of it and then told me about it. i stood up for him and tried to explain self injury to her, but i never said a word to her about my self injury, and i never said a word to him even though we both, i am sure, felt really really alone. a girl at my school had a poem that was blatantly about self injury published in the school literary magazine, but i never said anything to her about it either. one of my brothers friends wrote and produced a play about self injury, and i never said anything about that either. through all of this i just went on feeling alone...

so there you have my story. i know it's pretty long and boring, so if you made it this far i comend you.