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0 By Alan D.D.
You swore you would never be there again, that that time would be the last time, that you would remain clean, and yet here you are, feeling the cuts again, watching the blood on your skin, feeling guilty for lying to yourself and those who listened to you, those who put their faith on you and thought you would be better. What are you going to do now? I know what it’s like: I swore that I’d never cut myself again, too.
I know what it’s like
After senior year, I swore to my mom I would never cut myself again, and for three years I kept my word, but after so many issues went on at the same time that I broke again and was left in pieces, I locked myself in the bathroom with vinegar and the razor I shave with, only this time I used it on my knees.
A couple of days after that, when I’d already promised myself not to do it again, it happened one more time. The weight in my chest, the headache, the world spinning around, the lack of air in my lungs, and then came the blood, it always ended with the blood. I know that place as I know the hands I cut with and the reflection I can’t look at after doing it.
I know exactly how it feels and how big the sense of guilt is, how heavy it can be, and how weak you think you are, when you clean the wounds you don’t want anyone to know about. You have to keep the secret from everyone so they don’t know; you fake smiles when it hurts so no-one finds out. And it’s okay. It’s totally okay.
We’re not our mistakes
We all make mistakes, we all have our faults, but what it’s important to keep in mind is that they do not define us in any way. We’re more than the sum of our errors, we deserve to be happy, and there’s a light waiting for us, not in the outside world, but inside all of us. We just need to find the right way to turn it on, and it will be there forever.
It doesn’t matter that we fail and do it again. As long as we’re still alive, as long as we keep the air in our lungs and blood in our veins, we will have hope, we will be able to change it all and make this life whatever we want it to be. No one can take that away from us, and that’s the only thing we need to care about.
There always comes a time when we fall again. I’ve done it many times in the past. Despite repeating to myself that I’ll never do it again, I don’t know what the future holds. This only makes me try harder to prove that I am right, that I have the control and not the demons that live in my head. They’ve been at bay so far, and they will remain like that for a very long while.
UNITED STATES
UNITED KINGDOM
[…] Whether they thought that I was doing it for attention, I don’t know. I can’t guess at what their understanding of self-harming was back then. However I do know that, for the most part, awareness of self-harming and the reasons and motivations behind it have come on by leaps and bounds these days, in the eyes of medical professionals at least. With friends and family members though, there’s still a huge amount of stigma around self-harming. […]