untitled (Aged 23)

The death blow to my depression. Logic has finally caught up with the rest of me. I suppose this is the happy ending.

I decided that suicide and self-mutilation, in my case at least, arise from a logical fallacy. 

I have turned to those options as a means to change my circumstances.  Death was motion, and motion was preferable to stasis.  Self-harm necessitated a change in reaction, a more bad-assed self, indoctrinated to pain, or attention from beyond, to reach in and explain what had stalled everything.  I desired a mechanic for my life-engine, and was concocting worrisome pings, and bangs to attract attention.

But what I assumed to be a direct result of actions did not and does not follow.  Change does not come from holes carved in one’s arm.  Those things are symptoms, and perpetuating the symptoms does not change the disease.  
What causes this is a depression, a depression possibly caused by a chemical imbalance, but exasperated by a world-view that turns quickly into an self-obsessed miniscule observation.  The drugs to amend the chemical balance can buy me time, but they are not infallible.  My only chance at serenity is to redirect that world-view.  
Drugs could help.  But they could also hurt.  My scar came while I was on drugs.  Carved into my wrist with a kilt pin.  Repetition.  Blunt instrument.  Repeated pain wielded with persistence.  I was so bent on changing things that I carved into myself, despite my body screaming not to.  And that was part of me medicated.  Drugs are not the whole story.

So self-mutilation is not a means of change.  Hospital stays require that you leave the hospital, and take over yourself at a later date.  Hospitals were another fantasy of mine, that by some freak accident, or some fortuous chance, I’d be badly hurt, and have someone else take care of everything.  “She can’t do it, I’ll take care of it.”  And then realize that that kind of patronization drives me up a wall.  No, not a choice.

So my only real option, as death is out until the time comes, self-mutilation is illogical, then is to go out and become what I want to be.  Trite, it sounds like everything people tell you in horrid books about how to be a person, and I’m sure a thousand commencement speakers a year batter away at a bored populace with that exact axiom.  But as with most things, from cooking to music to art to who knows what else, there is the light and fluffy truth that everyone thinks they hear and know, and then the same truth you learn the hard way by discovering its bitter, darkening notes, that add substance body to the truth, making it something capable of being clung to, and something worthy of clinging to.