Be Proud to Say...

[Eyeshadow]

Feelings Don't Last Forever. Scars do.

Negative feelings almost always overpower positive ones, and sometimes when you are feeling really low, the negative feelings can be so powerful that you can’t see how you will ever feel differently. Something I have learnt over the last few months is just how quickly the way you feel can change. One minute I can feel happy and the next, terrible. There very often is no middle ground and it can be scary when your mood changes so rapidly. The same goes for my urges to self-harm. I can feel no urge at all, and then all of a sudden, an urge so strong it is virtually impossible not to act on it. A piece of advice I was once given is, when you feel the urge to self-harm wait for 15 minutes and the likelihood is that the urge will have lessened or will have gone completely in that time. 15 minutes can feel like one hell of a long time when you are battling with really strong destructive urges, but it is worth trying to wait it out because feelings don’t last forever, but scars do. 

How You Feel on the Inside Doesn't Always Show.

[Marker pen]

These are feelings that go round and round my head all the time. I suppose you could say that I drink and cut myself to deal with these feelings and to try and make them go away, but I hate to say, it doesn't work like that. In my experience, self-harming only intensifies these feelings. Keeping a big secret from friends and loved ones, like the fact that you are harming yourself, only makes you feel more lonely and isolated.

It isn't always that easy to...

[Marker pen]

In fact, it is NEVER easy to say no, but it is possible!

Probably My Biggest Fear...

[Acrylic paint and marker pen]

Last night I was drinking, alone. Drinking, drinking, drinking and getting progressively more drunk. My urges to self-harm tend to be much stronger when I am drunk. Although, I think the real reason for that is because when I drink I am out of control. I lose my inhibitions and my ability to be rationale about reasons not to cut myself decreases.

These urges were strong last night, really strong. I wanted to cut, I wanted to see blood. I wanted to feel blood running over my skin, but I didn't. Instead, I got a tube of red paint and smeared it all over my body, rubbing it into my skin. It felt cold. It was satisfying. I was in control and I could mark my body in whatever way I wanted to, but it wouldn't be damaging and it wouldn't be forever.

Why do we Self-harm?

I have been told that there are 3 reasons why people self-harm:

      

• Pain
• Attention
• Visual representation of how you feel

I know I don’t self-harm to feel pain. Whenever I cut myself I feel numb, I don’t feel any pain. Not until afterwards anyway, but I have a very high pain threshold. I definitely don’t self-harm to get attention. I am a very private person and self-harm for me is a very private behaviour. I don’t cut myself where people can see, and I do everything I can to hide it. Only a handful of people know I still self-harm. People know that I used to self-harm, and they can see from the scars all over my body but it is not something people ask me about nor is it something I talk about, so attention is in no way a reason for me to cut myself. So that leaves the last reason- visual representation.  

Whenever I cut myself, I like to take a photograph of the wounds at their worst. I am sorry if this sounds really strange, but somehow it helps. I am not even sure if I can explain why it helps, because sometimes seeing images of self-harm can be a trigger, but other times just seeing the wounds on my body is enough to make me feel like I don't have to do it again. I am a visual and artistic person in a lot of ways, so it makes sense to me to express myself visually and I guess that is what self-harm does. It says what you can't say with words.  In my meeting yesterday my case worker said 'When you are feeling messed up in your head, you make a mess on your body' and as she said this, something in my head clicked. When I look at my wounds that are still healing, and the mass of raised purple scars I have on my thighs and hips, I do feel like a mess. I find them ugly and unattractive and I wonder how anyone would be able to see past this mess that I have made of my body. They make me feel sad. I wish they didn't look the way they do, and I hope that they fade fast, although I know that is unlikely. However, I feel differently about the scars I have on my arms, and other parts of my body. These scars are much older, most of them about 5/6 years old. For a long time I was ashamed of these scars and very conscious of how people would react to them. I would always wear clothes that covered them up. It took me a long time to conquer these feelings and only in the last couple of years have I truly been comfortable with having my arms on show. My attitude towards these scars has really changed now. After my meeting yesterday I want to embrace my scars because they are a part of me, and each and everyone one of them represents a part of my life and tells a story. I am not in any way advocating self-harm nor legitimising it by suggesting that it is an expression of your feelings, but self-harm is my way of documenting my life. Each scar means something to me and reminds me of what I have overcome because I am still here. Which amazes me sometimes. 

What I have learnt in these past 30 odd hours is that there are other ways of visually representing my feelings on my body. I don't have to mark myself permanently any more by cutting myself.  It was suggested to me that instead of cutting I try drawing and writing on my body instead. I can use red pen if I want something that resembles blood. I could use paint. I could write those negative words that go around in my head, I could write a diary entry. There are so many possibilities and ways that I could express my feelings visually. My body is my canvas and this is my project. I hope that I have found a way to recover from self-harm, for good. The purpose of this blog is for me to document the images I make, and my journey to recovery. 

My Story

So, I have been a self-harmer for 10 years now, and I have never really understood why I engaged in such behaviour. My self-harm has taken a number of different forms. I have suffered from anorexia to the point of hospitalisation, I have abused alcohol and I cut myself with razor blades. Whilst I can say, I no longer feel the need to starve myself, the last two forms of self-harm I have mentioned are still very current in my life.

I have had a lot of ‘therapy’ over the years. Some good and some bad, but it really doesn’t matter how much therapy you have. Self-acceptance and acceptance of life experiences you have had that you may want to forget, comes from within. In my opinion, it doesn’t really matter how much talking you do, and how much people try to help you because you have to want to help yourself. Don’t get me wrong, talking is great. I love to talk. Not so much about feelings, I am pretty rubbish at that, but talking is great. I have always struggled to open up and talk about my feelings in a ‘therapy’ type setting (and I put therapy in inverted commas because I don’t really like the word and the connotations it has) but I have been lucky enough to encounter some incredible individuals both in my school years and at University, who have given me their support and their time and their care when they really had no obligation to. I have trusted these people, and really opened up to them and I can safely say that they have saved my life. Without their generosity, kindness and patience I really think I would have given up on my life a long time ago. Over the years, and with the help of these lovely people, I have learnt to be better at letting my guard down, and being open and honest about my feelings in my meetings with mental health professionals, which is definitely paying off.

Yesterday I had a meeting with a woman I have been working with over the last 6 months, who has been helping me manage my problem with alcohol. We were talking about self-harm. Up until 9 months ago, I had not cut myself for 2 years.  That is not to say that I had not ever had the urge to in those 2 years, but I had managed to resist. I would not be able to pinpoint a single reason to explain why I started to cut again, because I think it was something that had been building up over a long period of time, but I do know that the second of those 2 years was a very tough one. It felt like one negative experience after the next. Everything became too much and I lost all sense of self-belief and self-worth, and there wasn’t even much of that there to begin with! I was no longer able to resist those urges to cut myself. During the last 6 months my self-harm has worsened. There have been periods of no cutting or drinking at all and I have made a lot of progress in a number of ways, but the cuts have got deeper and when I drink, I get drunker. Every time I cut now, I know that I am going to cut so deep that I will need medical attention and to be stuck back together somehow.  I also know that I cannot carry on like this. Acknowledging that things need to change is a big deal and a step in the right direction, but unfortunately breaking a 10 year old destructive, yet self-soothing, habit is easier said than done and until about 30 hours ago, I was not convinced I was going to be able to succeed.

So, this meeting I had yesterday turned out to be something of a revelation and marks a real turning point in my attitude towards self-harm and how to recover from it. Self-harm is an incredibly complex behaviour to engage in, and people do it for many different reasons. Even as somebody who self-harms, I think it is very difficult to understand why you do it. But, if you want to stop doing it, you really have to understand why it is you do it. This is why yesterday was such a revelation for me. I finally understood my reasons for cutting myself and something in my head shifted.