self-injury.net

I kept cutting, because it worked. When I cut, I felt better for a while. When I cut, my life no longer overwhelmed me. I felt too keenly the thread of chaos, of how things can get away from you in a thousand ways. Bodies expand, grades plummet, pets die, paint peels, ice caps melt, genocide erupts. Entropy keeps eating at the ramparts, and I cut to shore them up. I cut to lay down a line between before and after, between self and other, chaos and clarity. I cut as an affirmation of hope, saying, I have drawn the line and I am still on this side of it.

Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement.  Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered.  in her right hand, she held a half-smoked cigarette, which she was slowly moving toward her left hand.  Françoise barely suppressed a scream.  The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips.  It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.  The sight of it was almost unbearable, it concealed something horrible. Read more »

How many cuts could I count? How many could I place in time and context? I had to admit that I couldn’t remember the occasion of almost any of them, their catalysts, whether epic or mundane, completely obscured by time. So many moments of supposedly unendurable pain, now utterly forgotten. You start to think, Maybe I don’t need this anymore. Maybe I never did.

I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting; that’s the plain and inelegant truth. No matter how compelling the urge, the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the urge, but the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the flood tide of emotions that drove me to that brink, but I had the power to decide whether or not to step over. Eventually I decided not to. Read more »