Healing

A reflection of my not-so-happy past

Healing takes time. It takes energy. The body does its best to repair the damage it has suffered. So does the heart. But sometimes it cannot fully heal, and then the flesh scars. I have only one scar, but it tells of a very difficult time in my life - one that I have no wish to ever repeat.

It was early in the month of February that I first discovered the release of pain. I do not remember what possessed me to do it, nor what made me think that it would help. I merely picked up a sewing needle and began to scratch at my wrist relentlessly. Of course, it only left a small scratch, but at the time even that small amount of pain was enough to give me relief from my emotional pain. I put the needle back on my nightstand and went to sleep, my heart lighter and heavier at the same time.

I didn’t realize at the time why I began cutting. I didn’t know why I had been so down over the past few months, and I was too scared to find the answer. Maybe I already knew it. But as time went on, I began to cut more. The next time, it wasn’t a needle I used though. It was a sharp blade. I never did cut deep, seeing as how my tendons are right near the surface of my wrists and I didn’t want to sever them, but it was always deep enough to draw blood. Sometimes it was messy, sometimes it was a clean cut. But it didn’t matter to me. I didn’t care that every time I cut, I did it in the same place, making the scar worse and worse. I didn’t care if my wrist was a mess. I just needed the release from … well from a lot of things.

Now, one might ask, what would make a young girl with a seemingly happy life (or anyone for that matter) turn to something as destructive as cutting? Well, maybe it was dealing with the fact that I had cheated on my boyfriend three times with his best friend. Maybe it was the fact that my boyfriend didn’t seem to care enough to do anything about it. Maybe it was sitting against the lockers day after day watching my boyfriend flirt with a good friend of mine, while I tried to keep myself from falling apart. Or it could have been his worthless apologies and promises to pay attention to me the next day, which in fact were empty. Or maybe that my friend never told him off for abandoning me like he had. Either way, it had done its damage. Within a month after I started cutting, I broke up with my boyfriend.

And then, my mother noticed.

I was stupid, thinking she wouldn’t notice my almost healed cut, and I mistakenly wore short sleeves. Of course, when she did notice, I tried to tell her I had fallen, but she didn’t buy it. Go figure. That’s that I get for having a nurse as a mother. She and I had a long talk that night, and after it felt like things were great. I told her I’d stop. But I only made it a week before something pushed me too far and I went back to my blades.

Three months passed in a whirlwind of broken promises, tears and blood. It took me the bulk of those three months to finally let go of my now ex-boyfriend. That was hard. But I couldn’t be happier. Not long after I broke up with him, a friend of mine asked me out. He had been there for me through everything that had happened with my ex, and he had known me since grade 5. So I decided to give him a chance. Meanwhile, I was still cutting. And it started to feel like it wasn’t enough. Once I remember I cut in the evening and then the next morning I still felt s****y so I went over it again with the blade. So my current boyfriend made me promise I would stop. He told me I either quit cold turkey, or he would take me to the counsellor. So I stopped. That was a month and a week ago, and even though I have been tempted, I haven’t touched my blades since.

But stopping hasn’t been easy. That’s one thing that bothers me-a lot of people seem to think that it’s so easy to quit doing. Maybe it is if you have the willpower to fight the near-suffocating desire to feel something other than hopelessness. But I know personally, for me, almost every day has been a struggle. Sure, it gets easier as time goes by, but it’s still difficult on the days when everything seems to be going wrong. Cutting is like an addiction. It’s a short-term way of dealing with potentially long-term problems. It’s a coping mechanism, and an effective one too. But it’s still dangerous. People who cut don’t normally seek to kill themselves by cutting. They merely seek to deal with things going on in their lives; things that no one else may know about. Sometimes they’re silently telling you that they think they need help, and that they either don’t know where to get it, or are too scared to get it.

“Tell them to look up. Tell them to remember the stars. The stars are always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds. We miss them in the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope." This was said by Renee, the girl who started the non profit organization To Write Love On Her Arms. The quote means so much to me, because it tells us that we need to look up. We need to remember. We do have hope, and we have help. We may not always remember the people who care about us the most, because we are so lost within our feelings of despair and hopelessness. But we need to remember that, even though it may often feel like we are alone in a big ugly painful world, there are people who love us and who want to see us be whole and well and happy again.

We need to remember that we can heal. And even though the scars will remain with us for the rest of our lives, we can move on.


Edit: It pains me to say that since the time this was written, I have added 6 more scars to my original 1.