Sagittarius
Self-injury is nothing new. From the hardcore 13th and 14th century Christian flagellators to Sid Vicious carving "Nancy" into his chest after a show to the stereotypical teenage girl taking out her adolescent angst on her skin with various instruments of mild disfigurement, self harm is here to stay. Regardless of that piss poor history lesson, we as a society are no closer to understanding how or why it is someone could purposely injure themselves.
Cutting is to bodily pain what suicide is to death - uncomfortable at best. We seem to have no trouble with boxers who repeatedly beat each other into concussions, brain injury, eventual financial destitution and death.
Somehow we have grown accustomed to drive-by shootings, workplace and high school massacres and men who routinely hit their wives on Super Bowl Sunday because the bean dip isn't warm enough. Homicide, domestic violence, rape and Mariah Carey fans; we hate them all, but suicide and cutting are still taboo.
Even after it came out that Princess Diana was a cutter, it seems it made no difference in our understanding or acceptance of self-injury. I get the feeling the average citizen has an easier time coping with her horrific death than the fact she cut herself. Visualize the difference.
On the one hand, a mangled Mercedes in a Paris tunnel and the knowledge that one of the world's most loved women was gone. Tragic, shared grief. On the other, a closed room where Diana sat alone, with bandages, rubbing alcohol and the razor blade of her choice neatly laid out. And so she sat, as a frontal assault of emotional pain flooded her mind while she decided the best method to assuage that pain was to draw the blade across her skin until it bled.
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Re: Self-Cutting: The Wound That Will Not Heal
By Scott Cooper, August 1, 2008 at 17:44Bear hug happily accepted. The ending of the story is intentionally ambiguous because, via therapy, medication and the hope that Heidi Klum will leave that guy and move in with me, the future is still an unknown, somewhat frightening prospect.
While self injury is rather grim in its own way, I believe, it may be a more desperate call for help to live rather than a slow disintegration towards death. In that sense, you are right; it is a cry for help without the tears. And tears are a much more functional release.
I appreciate your support and the support and love of the community. Hopefully in time, I will look back at my fading scars with a small smirk in relative safety as "that time in my life." But, if worse comes to worse and I find myself in four point restraints on a thin mattress in a white psychiatric room, I'll take heart in the fact that you still like the writing. I may suffer now and then but I'll live. If the writing suffers, all is lost...
That small joke aside, thank you. At least if I'm writing, you know what I'm not doing and that's a start.
Re: Self-Cutting: The Wound That Will Not Heal
By Heather Wallace, July 31, 2008 at 10:53Hi Scott - it's Heather. I did remove one of the pictures because it was too graphic for our site, but that said, I do appreciate you reaching out for help and trying to show us what we need to see in order to understand what it is you're going through. I do read this as a cry for help. All I can say is that you are not alone, and we value you very much as part of our Orato.com community, as you know. You've been gracing us with your stories for a long time, and you know we love you. That said, we're a little unsure how to approach this latest story. Certainly the writing is still excellent and we don't want to look away from what it is you're saying.
When we published The Bridge: Looking Into The Abyss, I remember you writing to me saying how touched you were that we actually talked to Eric Steel and by what he had said. Steel's message was basically that by looking away from suicide, we are not going understand it, and that we need to look at it - at the darkest moment in a human life.
Essentially you are standing on the bridge, and like Steel said, I believe you want people to pull you back in a bear hug embrace. Consider this my hug. Choose the fight, not the defeat.
And I do understand this whole self-cutting thing. For a year in my adolescence I cut my arm. Like you, I wanted to break things. I did break things. I broke glasses and then used the pieces to mark my arm with all the pain I needed to outwardly manifest, and then the next day, though a part of me wanted people to see how much pain I was in, the big challenge was how to hide it from people's eyes.
Luckily for me, that horrible year ended, and I stopped needing to do that. I was 15. Seventeen years have passed, and I can't imagine living with that from then until now. I still mark myself, but now I express myself in tattoos. I just recently covered up my old wrist scars with a butterfly tattoo, to symbolize the 17 years of healing I've been through since my family fell apart. It got a little infected, but the new skin is emerging underneath, and I look forward to seeing how it scars.
Scars can be beautiful because they tell a story. But the story you're telling does not have a happy ending, and I don't believe in it. I don't believe it's the way your story ends. You have too much power to write a different ending. So get writing.
I'm reading Eat, Pray, Love right now, and in it there's this beautiful story about how an old healer in Bali tells the author he knows the way to heaven through meditation, and in heaven it's all Love. He says he also knows the meditation that takes him to hell, but that meditation is best left to advanced healers, since one must pass through much sadness to get there. The author asks the healer what is in hell, and he said it's all Love in hell too. "Same-same," says the healer. "Same in end, so better to be happy on journey."
Heather
senior editor
Orato.com