How I feel when I look in the mirror...

[Lipstick]

You cannot see it, but...

[ Stamps and Ink]

There is so much pain in my heart.

The more time I spend thinking and talking about my self-harm, the more it seems to make sense to me.

As I have said before, I believe that you need to be able to understand the reasons why you self-harm before you are able to challenge them.

I am normally a very articulate person, I have a lot of opinions and I am almost always able to explain them to others. The problem lies with feelings and emotions, and my inability to express them most of the time, especially when the emotion I am feeling is pain.

I have never been able to tell people when I feel emotional pain and I feel as though my self-harm and self-harm in general, is often a physical representation of the emotional pain that we find near impossible to express.

For some reason, people who self-harm seem to believe that hurting themselves physically will relieve the emotional pain that they feel inside, but in my opinion, and my own experience, that pain, that heartache, will remain whether you hurt yourself or not. 

[Lipstick]

When there are voices inside your head telling you to hurt yourself try not to listen to them. At the time they feel so powerful and like they will never go away, but they will. If you can distract yourself and keep yourself occupied, put your fingers in your ears and say 'I'm not listening' then the feelings will subside. They probably won't go away completely but you will be in a better position to rationalise and keep yourself safe. It really is worth a try. 

Who decides what is beautiful?

I do not think that I am a shallow person, but I do care about the way I look, and I would argue that everybody does to a certain extent. It matters to some people more than others, and different individuals have different opinions about what is attractive and what isn't, whether that is internally or externally. But I think that deep down everybody would like to consider themselves to be attractive.

I am not sure if I have ever believed myself to be attractive....

I know that in the past other people have considered me to be attractive, in terms of the way I look, but I find it much harder to recall many occasions where people have complimented me on my personality and found that part of me to be attractive. For me, personality is far more important to me than looks and I want people to love me because of my personality, not because of the way I look.

Having said that, I feel that I will find it increasingly difficult to consider myself to be physically attractive now that I have caused such damage to my body. I know that the majority of my scars, despite the fact they will fade, will remain very visible for a long time. I am terrified that my scars will hold me back in life and prevent me meeting somebody to share my life with which is something I want most desperately. 

It is very interesting hearing about how other self-harmers feel about their scars. I know that some people really embrace their scars, are fully comfortable with them and are not afraid or ashamed of exposing them, because they believe that they represent an inner strength, and an ability to get through rough times which makes them feel proud. There is a big part of me that feels that way too. Whilst I do not advocate self-harm to be a positive coping strategy, it has been my way of keeping myself alive and I am proud of myself for getting through some of my more negative life experiences. Nevertheless, I cannot help but worry about how my scars might impact on the rest of my life. 

In my opinion, the journey to acceptance of your scars is probably as long and as tough as the journey to stop harming yourself in the first place, but I truly believe we will all get there someday.

Scars may not be conventionally beautiful, whatever that means, but having come out the other side of whatever triggered us to self-harm makes us all beautiful people.