The vermeil streams set ablaze by the luminescence of the moon peeking through the widows in a room dark as a sinner’s heart cause me to pause for a moment and admire the finesse of this particular handiwork of mine. The stinging fiery sensation of a fresh wound is slowly being replaced by a dull, throbbing pain, as it always does, and as always, I sit there, revelling in the last moments before I become numb again, seeking to somehow stop it from dulling but if I know if I make the cuts any deeper, they will take too much time to heal and that will lead to unnecessary attention and I abhor that idea. It has been this way for a while and as I think about this the earliest time I can remember comes to mind.
I am about five. It’s somebody’s birthday and my relatives are gathered here. Fearing the inevitable, I try to control myself. Ironically this very act of self censure results in me being so tired that when my mother scolds me for something, I reply rudely and regret it almost immediately as a look of hurt vivid enough for me to comprehend passes across her face. Before anything happens I run inside my room and lock the door, knowing even then that doing it in public is a bad thing. And then it starts.
I start scratching my legs and arms, somehow convinced that this is the only way to earn absolution for my sins. My arms and legs are swollen and are the colour of ripe tomatoes now. I stop, knowing what’s going to happen to me next will probably cause me to come back to this room in an hour or two. And so it happens.
As soon as I come out of the room, I can hear everyone whispering about how its all because I am an attention seeking child who’s parents are spoiling him and so on and so forth.
Those whispers are filled with poison enough to kill a full fledged man let alone a five year old child. And so I die a little every time, for how would feel if you knew that people thought the only reason you did what you did was to be a brat and not because there were genuine animalistic urges that forced you to behave as you did.
I scratch myself again that day.
At this time the act feels criminal and instead of alleviating my guilt over what I have done makes me feel even more guilty.
This continues until my early high school years. I have learned to hide the fact that I cut, aided by the fact that I don’t do sports or such activities which require you to expose your body. There I realize that I am not the only one cutting myself. Sure, I may be one of the only ones who’s self harm is visible to everyone but I am hardly unique in the act of self harming and cutting. Have I not seen my friends cut parts of their souls and personalities to please someone or just for the sake of entering a particular group? Have I not seen people inhale and exhale and consume substances that are surely more dangerous than 2 cm cuts that’ll easily heal? So why am I considered deviant in my nature?
The answer is, I find a few years later, because supposedly I am trying to kill myself. I can do nothing but shake my head at this reasoning, for if I wanted to take away my own life, all I had to do all those years ago, was to go down the street instead of crossing the road. Just because a person wants to hurt himself/herself doesn’t always mean that (s)he intends to kill themselves. On the contrary, I think, the timer on my phone showing that I only had to wait two more minutes before the wounds seal up naturally, the reason I continued cutting in the latter years of high school and university is not to stop me feeling but actually the reverse. It was not that I didn’t had any support, it was that there had come a time in which numb was all I felt. And in that time I started cutting myself again, not to take my life, not to destroy it but to truly experience it, to feel alive, to be alive.
I think how it is only the general queasiness and the taboo nature of blood that makes what I am doing, seem wrong to people, for I, myself, have many a time popped a zit, plucked out my eyelashes or beard hair in public and though it hurts and qualifies as self harm, I have yet to have faced public ire over this.
The timer shrills and I silence it and start bandaging my arms, putting a long sleeved shirt over it all after I am done, lest I appear as an abnormal overstressed young adult and instead a normal overstressed young adult.
