Hey, this honesty thing sucks.
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’s not all that much to say. I would not know what to say. “Gee, I’m glad you’re better now!” “Ewww, blood!” Right.
So instead, I’ll start a little Q&A. Feel free — or not — to ask the questions that are normally pretty damn rude or intrusive. I know people have them.
Do you have visible scars?
Yes, on my arms.How visible?
Very.Do you wear short sleeves?
Not in February.In the summer?
Yes.What do people say?
Usually: nothing. Occasionally: were you in a car accident?Are you nuts?
Yes.Didn’t it hurt?
That’s sort of the point.Did it help?
Yes.With what? How?
With a number of things. Distraction from things that hurt more. Hurting myself before someone else could, or so that it was some sort of a choice. Feeling something. Doing something instead of trying to kill myself.Whatever, like cutting yourself isn’t suicide or an attempt.
It’s not. It’s fairly often done instead of killing oneself.So it’s for attention.
Yes! Because of course I had no other ways in the entire world of getting attention!
Of course not. Dismissing it as “attention-seeking”: not a good way of, you know, *helping* people who are clearly in pain; it’s not a fun hobby.
The other side of that is: are you serious? All people need some sort of attention paid to them, paid to who they are. Is there something wrong with that? Are you claiming that you would like to be ignored by everyone for the rest of your life?
These are things I haven’t thought about in a while, and it’s sort of interesting to revisit them from some distance. Thoughts that I have occasionally still, which I’ve learned to ignore or pretend not to hear, but which are there, anyhow.
I don’t think I deserve much, really. I’ve changed enough that I think I deserve a little bit — sometimes — but it’s easy to pretend otherwise, and generally I do. Still, pretending doesn’t quite turn into believing. Not for me, in any case. On the other hand, acting mostly like I deserve a reasonably good life is what I would do if I believed it.
(A request: don’t suggest therapy. Yes, I know a lot of readers are really pro-therapy, and it’s really helped them. That’s great. But it hasn’t worked for me, and I have absolutely no interest in trying it again. I might be fucked up, but I know myself better than readers here do. And I know it’s all well-meant, and I’m not offended, but I just don’t want to hear about it.
Update:
And a note: I am changing comments to say self-injury, because it’s the term I like the best: cutting sounds sensationalistic and is inaccurately limiting; self-mutilation implies that the point is to make yourself ugly, and it’s not. Other people disagree with me about what to call things, and there are other valid ways of saying things, but this is my blog. I’m not offended, this is just something I’ve thought about a lot and feel strongly about.)
I’m not depressed now, just thoughtful.
February 25th, 2005 at 12:32 am
I didn’t see the earlier post — this one just popped up on the RSS now. Thank you for sharing your story. I think the telling of stories is one of the best ways to acknowledge the human condition, “messed up” as it may be at times (and I’m not calling you messed up here, just acknowledging that the world isn’t fully of perfect people and perfect lives and I include myself in that quivering mass of imperfection). While I can’t directly relate to this story or to self-injury, I can certainly relate to feeling pain and wanting to do something to get rid of it. Ummm … I’ll admit it. I don’t really know what else to say.
February 25th, 2005 at 12:39 am
It was negligence on my part and not lack of compassion.
I don’t know what to say. I know this is an issue in current culture. Toni Morrison used it in one of her works. Is self-injury fueled by the same thoughts as suicide? I can’t relate to cutting but I’ve certainly felt suicidal before and blogged it. It’s the thought of wanting to end the pain.
I think you’ve hit upon something with your thought that you don’t think you deserve much. Why shouldn’t you deserve everything the world has to offer? What have you done that precludes you from deserving the “good life?”
I won’t touch the therapist issue, per your request.
xox M
February 25th, 2005 at 12:45 am
didn’t see an earlier post (yet).
I wonder how I’d deal with this kind of manifestation of pain and someone thinking that he/she doesn’t deserve much.
thanks for sharing.
February 25th, 2005 at 3:56 am
I in fact did read your post yesterday, and started a comment, but did not publish it because I thought that it was nowhere close to the standard of thoughtfulness you set in your post. I guess had tried to articulate my deep respect for your having the courage not only to discuss these matters in your blog, but to carefully consider them, to own them, as it were, for yourself. God knows that all of us have elements in our past, idiosyncracies in our psyches, or strange dimensions to our temperments that are very, very difficult to claim as truly our own, let alone thoughtfully examine. You’ve done both, and this bespeaks a profound maturity on your part, a maturity worthy of emulation. I myself have issues that I need to address, and the first step is to deny that they are the accidental result of unfornutate contingencies, but very real characteristics that have been there for a very long time. Ultimately, I don’t have any questions for you because you are so damned good at asking questions yourself.
February 25th, 2005 at 9:29 am
Like melancholic, I saw the post but wasn’t sure what too say (it’s still marked as “new” in my Bloglines, waiting for me to come up with something). I guess I mostly wanted to say thank you for being brave enough to share this with everyone. I’ve never known someone who does this (or at least, that I’m aware of) and I find it really troubling - you say in this post that it helped you, which I can believe, but it seems like an awfully self-destructive way to help oneself (which I hope doesn’t come across as self-righteous - as profgrrrrl says above, we all have our different imperfections; dosing myself with sugary foods, which is what I often do to deal with stuff, isn’t exactly a constructive response either). In any case, you said that you’ve stopped doing this - if you don’t mind my asking, how did you become able to stop?
February 25th, 2005 at 12:36 pm
I really do understand why people wouldn’t have much to say to the other post — or this one, except that it pretty explicitly asks for a response — because in a lot of ways, there’s not much to say (and I also hold posts as new for ages, hoping to come up with a response). And if there are questions, well, it feels rude and intrusive. (It’s not, really, or not when I brought it up first. If you meet me and say “what the fuck happened to you?” then yes.)
I’m messed up, perhaps more than average. I know this. But we all are — messed up, imperfect, whatever. And we all hurt, and no one likes to hurt, and self-injury is, at root, no more and no less than a way to stop the hurting. Yes, it’s not perfectly effective. Yes, it does so by causing a different sort of hurt. But these make it no less a way to deal with pain.
I admit: I lie when I’m asked about it, or I imply that it was something other than what it was. In part it’s because random people don’t need to know about my psyche; in other part because it’s still so misunderstood that I get all sorts of bad reactions otherwise. Though I know I do little to help the misunderstanding by not talking about it, my life is my life, not a study in consciousness-raising.
Is it about suicide? Not really. The two are often linked, but the link is depression. I have often heard: the pain is intolerable; it was this or kill myself. So it’s, in a way, suicide prevention. (There is of course always a risk of accidental death, but it would be accidental, not suicide, though it might look like suicide.)
I’m not really willing to discuss why I don’t think I deserve much, though in the end, by now, there’s no reason: I just don’t. (It’s not at the same level as it was near the end of the thing I quoted in the other post. That was a long time ago.)
It is a hard thing to deal with, for yourself or as someone watching someone else. Because it is irrational, and you can’t argue someone out of it. I don’t have any good answers for how to deal with it, other than the usual. Listen, don’t dismiss things, don’t threaten.
I feel a hypocrite. Melancholic makes me sound more thoughtful and more honest than I truly am. I’ve considered it, yes, and I was on a mailing list for it, and read research about it, and I’ve gotten a lot of knowledge. But on the other hand, I don’t talk about it on the day-to-day — in part because I don’t need to, it’s not something that’s part of the same day-to-day life — and in part because people don’t react rationally to it, and because I find it hard to be open and honest about things that are so close to me. My blog is, after all, pseudonymous.
In part these things just happened, are accidents, but there are reasons behind them that are bigger than just an accident. Some of the causes are external, but I chose to keep doing it for years, to escalate it as I needed to, etc. (I’m not going to give any details: I have no idea who might be reading this, and there’s really no need.) And the causes are past; the effects are things that are still things that I need to think about, which still have effects on my life. (One of the reasons I dislike seeing doctors is because I dislike explaining the scars while trying to be convincing that it’s not a current issue and that I am pretty much sane.)
NK: is it more self-destructive than smoking, or drinking? My scars have healed; I don’t have lung or liver damage. (The examples can continue in this vein fairly indefinitely. The point is that it seems worse than it is; the destruction is on the surface. The psychological self-destructive — well, self-injury is the symptom, not the cause. It’s not good, but it’s not particularly worse than any other unhealthy way of coping.)
I am not sure how come it is so much worse to think about. Maybe it’s because the skin is the barrier between you and not-you, and injuring yourself gets rid of the barrier, or mocks it. I can’t say.
Yes, I stopped. I stopped sort of gradually. I stopped doing it regularly 4 or 5 years ago, with occasional relapses since. How? In part it was finding a good group of local friends. In (large) part it was being in a very good relationship with someone who valued me. In part it was making changes and not sticking with things just because I had started them, but leaving, even if it made me a quitter, even if I couldn’t quite explain the reasons. (That experience was quite certainly the only reason I managed to leave grad school in one — physical — piece.) It was a slow gradual lessening of self-hatred. It was a lot of work. It was having a good support group (mailing list).
And, as I said, there were relapses. And it’s something that still haunts me, in that it’s something I want to turn to when things are too hard, when I wake up and suddenly hate myself. It’s soothing — yes, perverse though it might sound, it’s a method of soothing myself. I have to actively choose not to do it, or choose to do something painful but less damaging — holding ice, say. I don’t need to do something minor often; I do fight the urges semi-often. (Every few months?) I guess I stopped a year or so ago, after doing it two or three times a year for a few years. I still miss it.
And of course, I stopped and started many times before that, where I very gradually got down to nothing. But in the end, it was making changes in the rest of my life so that I had enough there to put this away, that I had other areas to turn to when I needed to make the hurt go away. And I was willing and eventually able to do the work to get there, work which hurt much more than the everyday, average baseline pain I was in. That’s one reason why it’s so difficult to stop: the first however many steps hurt a lot more than what you’re used to, and though you’re told it eventually gets to hurting less, eventually can take a long time in coming.
February 25th, 2005 at 12:53 pm
Wolfangel–One usually hears about self-injury among teenagers. Is it also a significant problem with adults? Do you have a sense of whether the majority of self-injurers are teenagers? Sounds like you, at least, were doing it into adulthood. I have no experience with it myself, and so I can’t really relate to the reasons that cause people to do it. If it is something that’s most prevalent among teenagers, why? Why do people stop doing it later on (which is good, right)? (Maybe you don’t have answers to these questions, but your post made them occur to me.)
February 25th, 2005 at 12:58 pm
Ianqui: I will get back to you on that. Also, I’m moderating stuff with the word t-e-e-n in it (automatically), so if a comment doesn’t show up immediately, that’s probably why. I will approve the comments regularly. I’m also going to upgrade this weekend and get that whitelist thing going, which will be nice.
February 25th, 2005 at 3:39 pm
Years ago, when I was younger and feeling somewhat depressed, I wondered about finding support online (except for blogging, which I’ve only started recently, I’ve never spent much interactive time on the computer). I read some newsgroups (the only title I remember was soc.loneliness, I think there may have been some alt.’s as well) but did not find that helpful.
Then I tried a mailing list that I thought would be about depression in general. It turned out that almost all of the posters - at least during the time I was subscribed - self-injured regularly or were trying to stop. That was the first I’d ever heard of anyone doing this. And I thought, what could I say?
Having read your posts and comments, as well as the links you’ve provided, I think I’m closer to understanding this than I was before, and I’m glad to see that you’ve been able to get yourself to stop. But to be honest, like other commenters, I still don’t really know what to say.
February 25th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
Ianqui: yes, a significant number of adults self-injure, though I believe most of them started younger. The problem is that it’s seen as a teen girl issue, and it in, in the sense that teen girls do it, but not, because other people do it, too. I stopped in my early 20s, so I guess I’m another one of the many people who fit the stereotype.
The causes are like any other causes of unhappiness, plus a lack (or perceived lack) of a support system. But it shouldn’t be given a place of honour, of something so far out of the ordinary, incomprehensible if you’ve never done it. It’s not; it’s like doing any other thing that you know is wrong but is easier for the moment, or helps in the short term.
Teenagers most: probably because they have the fewest coping skills, I would guess. And also because they don’t have much other control over their lives, this is a way to choose *something*, even if it’s choosing pain. But you can’t change schools or move like you can if you’re an adult; you’re often stuck in whatever bad situation you’re in.
And people stop doing it because, well, it stops working so well (think of the “always looking for the bigger high” idea for drugs) and because it causes problems because it looks so bad, or because you need stitches (or other medical attention), or because any other reason people manage to stop being depressed. It’s about depression, generally, at root; depression mired in not liking yourself. Depression is, I think, more understandable to people.
eb, I think people sometimes get so surprised to hear that other people self-injure that when you find somoene who does, you suddenly talk about it all the time. Which has good points: you get understanding and not reactions of either incomprehensin or hysteria. On the other hand, things sort of turn to obsessing, which can be bad, too. (But it does avoid the threats or the attention only for self-injuring. That’s another thing, often: taking care of whatever you’ve done to yourself might be the only time you take care of yourself, so it sets up a vicious circle (which is I think often unconscious.))
What can you say? I think all you can ever do is acknowledge someone’s pain, and I think it’s probably the best way to handle things. And I did and do understand that it leaves people thinking: what the hell do I say here? I don’t blame people for not responding — what do you say? And I appreciate the responses that showed up after I asked for them (it does work!).
I hope people understand a bit that it’s not that far off normal, that it’s about depression, not about something else, not worlds apart from everyone else.
February 25th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
I once had a girlfriend who self-injured. (Not so much when I knew her, but she had a history of it.) It was about depression for her, too, I think. I’m inclined to believe you when you say it’s not that far off normal; that probably comes from having heard her describe it.
I didn’t know what to say in reply then and I don’t know now either, but I appreciate the explanation and I hope it helps you to talk about it.
February 26th, 2005 at 4:41 pm
Am I weird for understanding the desire to SI when I don’t? Well It’s just not my personality, I’m an anorexic so I do my harm through neglect not direct action. My damn passive agressive personality even comes through in my self-destructiveness.
I thank you for being so open about this and allowing us to ask questions. I’ve always wondered how best to support friends who SI and what if anything I should do when I notice people who are not close friends who self-injure? In the past I’ve avoided the topic with people I wasn’t already friends with. With a close friend who cut I tried to offer her other outlets for her pain while respecting that it was the often her best or only coping method for dealing with life, but it seemed a delicate balence between respecting her and condoning the behavior.
February 26th, 2005 at 9:58 pm
Yeah, I also have known/loved others who’ve done this, though not so extensively as you did I think - and I didn’t know what to say to them either.
What have people said to you that actually helped? What was well-meaning, but nevertheless hurtful?
February 27th, 2005 at 6:59 pm
I’m sorry I didn’t comment earlier, too. I think part of it is that it’s one of those things we don’t have ready-to-hand culturally-approved responses for. And also because I have to admit that while on the one hand I feel proud of you for overcoming a sense of shame to post this, I am also profoundly sad that shame should even be an issue here. This is part of you, and you are not shameful nor should you be ashamed.
I guess, too, is that I’m kinda perverse in not finding SI something to be surprised by. Partly this is because it seems to me to be both a compulsion (which therefore isn’t something a person can be blamed for) and a “reasonable” response to certain sorts of psychic pain — basically, it’s not like people say well, great, why don’t I cut myself? Sounds cool… (Well, maybe some do. But that doesn’t sound like what you’ve been through.) My surprise would probably be more along the lines of why more people _don’t_ SI.
The other thing is that, as a person who has spent the last 15 years dealing with a “picking” problem (currently under control, but only because my life is not very stressful right now), I can empathize with the ways that causing damage to one’s physical body can serve as a way to cope with psychic distress, and the difficulty in stopping it. I see cutting as a destination farther along a path I’m already standing on, so reading your posts, I’m reminded how grateful I am to have not had pressures on me that would have pushed me further down that path.
I’m glad you’ve developed new ways of coping since then.
I also am interested in the answers to the questions yami asks.
February 27th, 2005 at 8:48 pm
Oh, I’m not sure if I have so many other ways of coping — I guess I must — so much as I sometimes actively choose not to do this. Mostly I guess I fixed my life around that I wouldn’t need to do it as often because I wouldn’t go into serious depressions as often.
I think picking and eating disorders are just other ways of coping with things — bad ways, but better, always, than death. Or of control, which is another side of this coin.
I think that someone who starts it for whatever reason likely has something more going on than “trying to be cool”: it seems safer to take it seriously than to dismiss it as a prank or whatever people do when they say it’s just cause Christina Ricci used to self-injure. This also can bring up interesting questions about branding, scarification, piercing and tattooing, and how those are much more linked to self-injury than a lot of people would like to admit (especially for the last two).
February 27th, 2005 at 9:23 pm
WA: You’re right, I was simplistic in the way I was thinking about self-destructiveness; I guess I was thinking that way because self-injuring seems much more direct and I guess more consciously/aggressively self-destructive than other things like drinking/drugs? (Which you’re right, are just as if not more self-destructive in the long term; it’s probably easier to delude oneself that you’re *not* being destructive with drinking etc.) But I do get what you mean about it being a symptom, not a cause, even if I didn’t state that very clearly. Again, thanks for discussing it so honestly.
I do think you have a point about skin being a barrier - I’ve read a little bit by historians talking about how transgressing barriers (between inside/outside/skin/body) causes all sorts of anxieties in other people. I once read a fascinating book about early modern European witchcraft suggesting that one of the ways that people at the time understood witches was as people who transcended a lot of those kinds of boundaries between inner/outer etc.
February 27th, 2005 at 11:06 pm
NK, the other side is that of course it is self-destructive, and unlike things like drinking or drugs, the point is to cause pain, to hurt yourself — it’s not a side-effect. (Which means you can’t delude yourself, yes, but it also makes it I think different in other ways — more agressive is a good way of putting it.)
I don’t want to suggest that it’s a much better bad coping mechanism (than, say, drinking to excess), just that it’s not the worst one imaginable, and it’s not quite so far away from normal as it might seem to be. (The tattooing and piercing similarities here, particularly.) And that people who aren’t teens listening to sad music do it — though of course I do listen to sad music, too.
I don’t know much about the history of barriers, though it sounds really interesting. I know for me, self-injury had a lot (well, a secondary lot, most of what I’ve talked about is the primary lot) to do with the barriers, trying to figure out what was and wasn’t me, and where I could set my limits about myself. I’m not sure I’ve figured these things out, but I’m not sure there’s really an answer to them.
March 7th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
[…] rue, 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 w […]
September 3rd, 2005 at 12:23 am
[…] 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. […]
December 17th, 2005 at 5:56 pm
I’ve reading your blog and stuff , amazingly it imprsses me .No matter how cynuical I can be when times are not rope,I like what you say , I like when u lash out at what out egalitarian society wants us to conform too.You are a rebel .Just like the hippies of reagen era an d vietnam wars,who used to pff all worries out through weed , people like uss cut utselves.There is more to it than some pshchological trauma or what these self trumpeted sne people call a luat for attention : SI is an act of outrage ,an act of showing how impeccable one is and to show the frailness of human existence.We cut because of reasons that are deliberately not raised , as they are a taboo.SI is bad , and we are bad , the world is good , don’t stop us from cutting or we will slit the arteries of pulsating world open.let us burn and bleed in our own heavens.
“I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE”,CURT COBAIN , NIRVANA 1994