I wanna be Angelina Jolie
I am sure I could use a more misleading title, but it would be hard.
Michele at asmallvictory discusses the idiocy of “emo music causes cutting!”
And she’s right: people, in general, do not self-injure (my preferred term, by far, being more general and less sensationalistic than cutting (not everyone actually cuts); self-mutilation isn’t a word I like either, because it seems to suggest the point is something it generally isn’t) because it’s cool, or for whatever idiotic reasons come up in the media. Michelle Malkin’s post is so uninformed that I’m not even going to respond to it (or link to it); Michele responds to it well, and I’m sure there are other responses around. The book “Cutting” is a terrible, terrible book, though, all about the author as magical saviour of teenage girls.
There are ways to respond to this. There is a lot of information around about it — the best online resource I know of is Secret Shame. I’m not going to repeat the information here: it’s not just a teenage-girl trend, and it’s not suicide (indeed, it’s often instead of) or for attention or any of the other uninformed things people tend to think. Instead, I’ll go the personal route. Which feels dangerous.
For years (a decade) I self-injured, starting at around 13, but only causing serious damage much later. Cut myself, burned myself (heat or chemical, either). I will always have the scars. I have stopped, but I still want to, regularly, when I’m sad enough or scared enough or having trouble coping with how I am doing.
I didn’t do it because it was cool or because some celebrity did. I had no idea that anyone else in the world did this. It wouldn’t have mattered to me, really; I didn’t feel like I was alone and different because I self-injured, I self-injured because I felt alone and different. Yes, there was some brief comfort when I realised I wasn’t alone but . . . it was a symptom, not a cause.
And there was the social worker in high school who told me that I wasn’t so special, lots of other people self-injured. There’s a way to help someone out who is depressed.
The reasons I started are complex, in some ways, but simple in others. I was unhappy. I didn’t like myself. I didn’t trust my body. I didn’t feel I could talk to anyone, or maybe I felt if I did they’d hate me. (I still sometimes feel that.) This was a way of controlling the pain, and of concentrating my thoughts on something small and manageable.
Something I wrote shortly after I went online, on a mailing list, which sums things up (in a sort of pretentious teenager way — though an honest one), I think. I still sometimes wonder about the same things.
there are things in your life that you never believed could be part of your life. there are places you will go that you swore you’d never visit, or never even knew existed. there are days or weeks or months that your heart will beat mostly steadily through that don’t appear on any calendar. there are times you will see that cut deeper than you realise you went. there’s a pain you will feel that obscures hopes and dreams and goals. there are words you will hear that will silence all your words. there are scenes that will be a part of you forever, always running on a second screen somewhere in your mind.
[ . . . ]
i don’t understand why i do it, not really. i want to focus on something else, i want to punish myself - and mostly, i want to feel. i want to feel something, anything. i want something that will remind me that i’m human. i bleed red, like all mammals, like most animals . . . but it’s all that seems to be real about me. i can’t cry, i don’t cry. i sat in class once and noticed i had tears on my face when someone opened the door and there was a cross breeze and my face felt cold. evaporation . . .
i didn’t feel like i was crying, though. it didn’t make me feel any better. so i cut.
sometimes i do something and itches. that’s usually the only sensation i have. sometimes it hurts.
that scares me. what if i am human? what if i’m not worth less than nothing, not a piece of garbage or worse? what if i don’t deserve this? then what?
February 24th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
People who don’t do these things and who have never felt the compulsion to do them just have no conception of it at all. They can not imagine where such an idea would come from; they have no sense at all that these ideas can just come into your head and seem like exactly what you need to do right then. But since they can not fathom that these impulses could ever come from inside your head — from inside so many people’s heads — I’m guessing that they’ve decided to categorize the phenomenon as “something learned by seeing/hearing about it” instead of “something almost hardwired into certain people.”
If you know anyone who owns birds, ask them about birds who pull out their feathers. I doubt that birds all over the world watch tv shows and read magazines about famous feather-pulling birds and then decide from that to pull out their feathers.
February 24th, 2005 at 4:35 pm
Instead, I’ll go the personal route. Which feels dangerous.
I can imagine - but I for one respect your courage, and appreciate your input. Amy is right, in that people who have never done this have no conception of it - I speak as someone who would be insufferably insensitive to mental illness and self-injury if I weren’t closely acquainted with people who’d been afflicted with [above]. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I used to have a “aw, get over it already” attitude toward these sorts of things - and I abandoned it only because all of a sudden, it was my friends and family whose lives were involved. One day it occurred to me that my callousness sure as hell wasn’t helping anyone and might well have been hurting people I cared about, and felt (justifiably) awful.
So - thanks for taking the risk. It does make a difference.
February 24th, 2005 at 11:33 pm
[…] ng
I admit it: I’m sort of disappointed by the mostly lack of response to my earlier post about self-injury. I’m not surprised; there […]
February 25th, 2005 at 10:25 am
I think in part the compulsion to do it comes from having done it in the past; in a lot of ways, it’s addictive. Maybe only for some people, maybe just not everyone thinks of it, or comes across it (as I did, accidentally cutting myself and thinking, wow, this works), or is even in a position where they feel the need to do it.
If you’re self-injuring, even because [starlet] did it, there’s probably something wrong. And the fact that some teens say it’s because it’s cool — people lie, and especially about things like depression or abuse or whatever. (Please note: I have an entirely non-abusive family.) The best way to start when someone self-injures (regularly: people try all sorts of things — once) is not to say “hey, not cool” but to start off assuming something’s wrong.
I know I sound almost like I’m endorsing it. I’m not. I do think it’s not as self-destructive as many other self-destructive behaviours are, it just seems, somehow, worse.
MS, I understand that lots of people don’t understand things until it’s close to them. It’s normal, and I’m sure I do it myself all the time. The best you can do is learn. It’s not easy — in part because people have a tendency to blame others. If there’s a cause, you can prevent it from happening to you or loved ones. Oh, sure, usually you can’t, but at least it feels like doing something.
February 25th, 2005 at 4:21 pm
In some ways I don’t get it, because I’ve never had the compulsion. But my wife, for years, did, and still, in the throes of depression, self-injures in small, almost dismissable ways. (She had a psychologist dismiss it with “all the middle-class white girls do that.” !!!)
What’s so hard about it, especially from the outside, is knowing how to respond when it happens. Anger isn’t usually so effective in those situations. We’re still working it out.
I hope that you’ve found other ways to manage the pain and the depression, that the compulsion, if it still exists, is smaller and easier to resist.
Thank you for getting personal. It helps to know others have felt that way too.
February 25th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Pronoia, I’m sorry to hear about that therapist — it’s, sadly, an all-too-common response. I can give suggestions about the kinds of things that have worked for me or people I know, but I don’t want to be intrusive — let me know if you’d like to talk more about it, or if your wife would.
I have found other ways, some good, some not so good, but the compulsion is resistable, and it’s not this-or-die.
February 26th, 2005 at 12:18 am
Sorry about the lack of response you’ve had (this is the first time I’ve checked in in days). I wonder how much of that is most people’s discomfort with the topic.
I think it is really brave of you to write about this here. I knew someone who cut herself, and I came to understand after my initial headshaking that the physical pain she caused herself was nothing compared to the emotional pain she was carrying around. I’m glad you’ve found ways to cope.
March 6th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
[…] l. (True, mostly, but I like my dorky weirdo friends.) Plus, I shouldn’t talk: I had lots of problems when I was a teenager. I deserved that. But: I […]
September 2nd, 2005 at 11:16 pm
[…] Writing, however, is good therapy for me. So depression shows up a lot here, because often writing about it lessens it. And yes, because I get depressed more than would be ideal. And no, I don’t really like that, so I do what I need to do which, for me, means two things: writing about it and trying to recognise when I’m feeling stuck doing something I hate (and before it comes down to the “hey I want to kill myself, wait, this means there’s a problem” stage). I’m not always so wonderful at the latter, but I am working on it. And writing about it also helps me recognise it, which means that yes, I write about self-injury a lot, but I haven’t done it in a long time, either. So is it disturbing that I write about it, or even about wanting to (something which I admit comes up more often than I write about it, mostly because focussing on that particular thing tends to be destructive)? Maybe. Isn’t it better, though, that I write about it than do it? The point really: this blog does not pretend to be balanced, and it does not give equal space to everything I think about. […]