Helping or Harming

So looks like the next few weeks of the blog are not going to be as peppy as I would like, but I guess that's life. When I was younger, I self-harmed. Everything I say on this topic here is from my own experience and is my own opinion. I realise that self-harming can be a bad road for many people, but when I was younger it always helped more than it harmed. I don't have a troubled background, I come from a white, middle class, educated background. My family never lacked money and my parents never abused me.

But when I was roughly fifteen, I moved schools because of problems I had been having at my previous school and fell in with the alternative crowd at my new school. I had never really fitted in properly (though I'm not sure that anyone ever really feels as though they do in high school - no matter what it looks like on the outside) and a couple of my new friends self-harmed. I had never even considered it as a possibility before - it just wasn't the kind of thing that was usually in my universe. I came from a world of good grades and an excessive submersion in fantasy novels. But when the road got rocky for me about halfway through my school year in ninth grade, I fell into a regular pattern of cutting myself to deal with any psychological pain I ever felt.

It helped me more than it harmed me, or at least that's how it felt at the time. I couldn't get out of my own head and it was a way of bringing the pain in my mind to the surface. It made my pain real and watching the cuts heal was a cathartic experience. They would seal over, scab and heal and then when the pain got too much again, I would start over.

It was a way of controlling my own pain and anger. I'm still not sure what I was really angry at - it was a lot of different things. I just felt outside everybody else and very far away from it all. I felt alone and when I was really left alone, it was a secret between me and myself that helped me feel more in control over at least something in my life. When I felt I had no control over anything, it was a way of reminding myself that at least I could control my own pain.

At the start it definitely helped but months later when the cycle was still repeating itself, and getting more extreme, I told my mother what was going on as a way of making myself stop. To make sure someone else could check up on me to make sure that I didn't continue. The scars that I carry today serve as a reminder of what happened and why I should not ever go back there. Even though it did more good than bad for me, it was a seriously addictive cycle that damaged my body, and when the psychological pain had begun to ease, it was a lot harder to stop the cycle. Addiction never ends well for me...