What does self harm mean to you? What image do you get in your head when someone talks about self harm? I used to think of poor, sad, desperate teenagers who would cut their arms with razors. I guess I always had the thought in my head that although this was a sad thing to do that it was done more for attention than anything else.
Having been where I’ve bene this past year I now see it very differently. Self harm to me now means the following :
When the emotional pain is too much, when you are both numb and broken at the same time, sometimes you need to prove that you can feel, that you can hurt, that you are alive and not just a cardboard cut out. Thats when it can be tempting to hurt yourself in some way. To feel pain, to see blood - both proves that you are alive.
That’s my definition of self harm.
I am so familiar with the feeling of being numb, of not knowing whether I am alive or not. Not for a good few months but last summer was a bad, dark time for me. I would chew my fingers until they bled and then I’d feel angry, ashamed and in pain. But that was better than feeling nothing. I’ve always bitten my nails and chewed / picked my cuticles (attractive huh?) but its only been recently that I’ve associated that with self harm. For a long while it wasn’t a deliberate choice but then I realised that it made me feel better. That it helped. In a way.
You can’t hide what you’ve done to your hands when you literally chew them until they bleed. The shame of them looking so bad is better than the shame of feeling something that nobody knows. Its a public