Chapter Eight: Can’t You See My Pain?
Content warning: explicit discussion of self-harm. Those with a history of self-harm or intrusive thoughts about self-harm please skip this chapter.
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of self-harm since I was a little kid. And yes, I know exactly how strange that is.
When I was in preschool I was obsessed with appearing hurt. Of course, every young kid has an obsession with bandaids. Every time they get a bonk or a scrape, the bandaid is the magic fix. But my obsession went beyond bandaids. Somewhere along the line, I’d figured out that when you’re hurt, people pay attention to you. And I quickly learned that the best way for people to understand that you’re hurt is to wear bandages.
So, I would fashion bandages out of construction paper or paper towels or tissues and wrap them around a pretend injury. If I could get my hands on a bandaid or an ace bandage that was even better, but my makeshift dressings worked when I couldn’t get my hands on the real thing.
Once I was properly bandaged, I’d start to whimper or full out cry until a grown-up paid attention to me. Then I would present the fake injury and happily receive the love and soothing that came as a result. I didn’t know at the time that the adults in my life were just humoring me. I didn’t know that they were aware I was faking it and giving me the attention I wanted because it was so clear to them I was crying out for it. I just knew that when I wrapped myself up in bandages and pretended to be hurt, I was lavished with affection.
If I were a psychologist I’m sure that I’d have a lot to say about the psychic connection I made between hurt and love. Even as a layman I can understand that I had a pretty warped understanding of how pain related to getting attention. The simplest conclusion I can draw from this anecdote is that a part of me has always believed that displaying my pain on my body would make people see me, force them to see me.
Though my experimentation with displaying my pain to others started early, it didn’t escalate to actual self-harm until years later. I dabbled in self-harm in high school — scratching myself, burning myself with wax, brushing lit cigarettes against my skin, mostly when I was drunk or high — but never did anything as bold as actually cutting myself.
At that point in time, I was satisfied with displaying my pain — which consisted of a mix of major depression, anxiety, and a burgeoning addiction — with emotional outbursts. I made sure that everyone knew how much emotional pain I was in by screaming and sobbing and hurling words as if they were shuriken. And when the pain got to be too much, I would drink or drug or starve it away. I could always release the pain with an explosion or dampen it down. It never got stuck inside my body, scratching to get out. It was never so hidden that it couldn’t be seen.
Everything changed when I went to college. I was hours away from anyone I knew, all the people who tolerated my explosions and stuck around. I wanted everyone to like me, so I couldn’t show anyone how mean or negative or emotionally unstable I was. I couldn’t let anyone see my pain in the same ways I always had. I didn’t have my release, so my only choice was to dampen the pain.
College is a great place for dampening emotional pain. I quickly found that I could get as much alcohol and marijuana as I wanted, as well as a variety of other drugs that altered my experience enough to make life with my dysfunctional brain, my flood of negative emotions, my relentless, scathing internal monologue manageable. So, I spent the first semester of college drunk and or high nearly every day. And the pain stayed at a manageable level.
Of course, being fucked up nearly every day led to some pretty poor decision making. I did things that really hurt the people I loved. A few of those people asked me not to use substances when I went back to campus the next semester. And because I truly believed I didn’t have a problem, because I truly believed I could control my use, I promised them I wouldn’t.
So I went back to campus for the spring semester stark raving sober. And it was one of the most miserable times of my life. With no way to dampen my emotional pain, with no way to release it, I was a constantly exposed nerve. I’d never let my emotions build up in my body before then, so I never knew what it felt like to literally feel my feelings. Depression felt like an actual weight that I was carrying, making it difficult for me to move. Anxiety made my entire body buzz, made my skin crawl. Addiction created a physical longing that left me feeling empty. Life with my brain, in my body, was unbearable, and I had no idea how to make it feel better, how to let people know that I was in so much pain.
I was sitting on the floor of the shower in my suite one day (don’t worry, it was only shared with five other girls and we cleaned it semi-regularly), shaving my legs. My body felt too heavy to lift into a standing position. My whole body was buzzing. My skin was crawling. I felt like I literally couldn’t take it a second longer. I needed to do something to feel different.
So, I took my disposable razor and ran the blade across the skin of my inner forearm. And in that instant, the only thing my mind and body could focus on was the physical pain. Everything else — all the weight, the buzzing, the crawling skin, the racing, vicious thoughts — went away and all that I could feel or think about was the pain of the cut. As the blood trickled out of the cut, I felt the release that I needed, like the pressure being let out of an overinflated tire. As I felt the physical pain and the blood trickling down my arm, I felt at peace.
I started cutting myself on a regular basis. Never very deep, always superficially. Never with the intention of doing serious harm or killing myself. Just deep enough to release the emotional pain that was trapped inside. Just deep enough to see the blood trickle down my arm. Just deep enough to stop my brain.
At first, I would carefully bandage the cuts every time. I snuck gauze out of the first aid kit provided by the college and wrapped my arms. There was always a certain satisfaction in seeing my arms wrapped in those bandages — just like my preschool paper towel bandages. I’d wear long sleeves and pull them down over the bandages, smug with the secret of my solution.
But as my depression, anxiety, and unfed addiction got worse, I stopped caring about bandaging the wounds or hiding them. I wanted people to see my pain. So, I started parading around my dorm room with bare arms, covered in cuts, daring someone to say something to me, begging someone to be responsible for my pain, to make me feel better. None of my roommates said anything, and in retrospect, I don’t blame them. What can you possibly say to an 18-year-old trainwreck showing off her self-harm?
Eventually, the self-harm wasn’t enough to provide the release I needed. So, I went back to my most reliable form of feelings management — booze and drugs — which eliminated the need for self-harm… for a while.
A few years later — after I’d drank and drugged my way out of three colleges, a marriage, and quite a few friendships — I found myself in my bathroom, drunk out of my mind, digging a pair of scissors into my leg. I’d forgotten the rush of the pain, the release of the blood, the relief.
The next day, I stood in the shower with my boyfriend, daring him to say something about the angry, red lines on my thigh. And he did. But he didn’t say what I wanted him to say. He didn’t tell me that he was so sorry we’d fought. He didn’t hold me close and tell me everything was going to be ok. He didn’t participate in my self-pity. He simply told me that it wasn’t okay that I’d done this to myself and that I needed to stop.
And I don’t know why that worked. Maybe I loved him enough to stop because he wanted me to. Maybe somewhere deep in my heart, I understood that I deserved better than that. Or maybe I knew that it hadn’t worked the way it used to, that it hadn’t provided the same relief when I was too drunk to really feel it, and that it wasn’t worth it when it didn’t hurt like I wanted it to. I really don’t know why, but I never cut myself again.
I can’t lie. When my emotions feel out of control when my body is buzzing with anxiety when it feels like I’m about to explode from the sheer amount of feelings, which still happens sometimes, the first thing my mind goes to is something sharp against my skin. And sometimes those thoughts are all-consuming. Sometimes it takes everything I have not to act on them.
But the most valuable thing I’ve learned in the more than a decade since I sat in that bathroom, scissors on my thigh, is that not every thought requires an action. I do have a choice about which thoughts I act on and which ones I don’t. So, I just don’t. I sit with the overwhelm, I sit with the intrusive thoughts, I sit with the buzzing body, and I just don’t take the action.
And if I ever need a stronger reminder I look at my left thigh. I still have four perfectly symmetrical scars. A constant reminder.
