The Cuts Deepen

******TRIGGER WARNING******

A few days have passed since my last really bad day. It’s not that I got better, I didn’t, I just wasn’t ready to let The Monster take over my brain for that whole time and so I fought, hard, to get myself back to being me. I played some Xbox games, I progressed with my jigsaw, I chatted with friends and I ate 3 meals a day. I guess that’s some improvement.

Is it better to tell a lie to somebody or to just completely ignore them? I’ve been branded a liar by my dad since the age of 18 and that hurts. Who makes something like that up? I wonder if he ever accused victims in the police station of lying. I don’t hold much confidence there. In my moral dilemma, I had chosen to completely ignore the people I was meant to see in the hopes of making things easier for myself. It would be better for them to think I didn’t want to be there, because that’s the truth, than for me to have to go there and be forced to deal with demons and triggers that I’m not capable of facing. I wouldn’t have picked up the phone had I not thought it was the therapist ringing with news. I wouldn’t have taken a real stumble down the stairs of depression had I not picked up the phone. I’m not saying it’s their fault; her fault for calling but I was, as often happens in this war, fine until I wasn’t fine and that phone call was the trigger to the whole spiral.

I was adamant that I wouldn’t go to their house and I had a plan. I was going to spend the evening playing on my Xbox; just relaxing and making the most of an evening to chat to friends and chill out. I could have lied. I could have told them that I had to go to counselling or I could have told them that I had something else planned with work colleagues but I chose not to lie. I thought it would be better to just say nothing. Apparently that’s not a good choice to make.

There was nothing for me to say on the phone to make things better. My Gran was worrying and that meant I had to go and see them. A half hour conversation felt like days. As I slumped in my desk chair, shaking from the effect of the images in my head, tears streaming down my face, my voice changed and I recall saying, caught somewhere between yelling and sobbing, that I no longer wanted to be alive. People don’t know how to deal with revelations like that. I don’t even think people who are trained to deal with them really know how. Surely they must be caught on some level between their professionalism and their personal opinion; I don’t think that you can 100% shut it off though in the moment it’s all professionalism. She told me she had a friend who committed suicide so her life never got any better. She thought it was not worth fixing and she ended her life. Maybe things did get better for her though? She wouldn’t have felt any pain anymore. If you haven’t felt the pain, then how can you judge it and say that it’s easy to just push yourself further and further. I need to be hard on myself, is what she said.

I know one thing. Guilt tripping somebody who’s feeling suicidal by telling them about a friend of yours who isn’t here anymore, doesn’t help. The only thought that I could see right then, was “lucky her”. My mind was overtaken with venom. I could see nothing through my hatred of them. The only clear way out from the consuming hatred and pain would have been death. Guilt is a strong feeling. I begin to hit my head with my free hand. I am almost convulsing. In the same way that I do when I have to deal with the tougher issues in counselling, I hide behind my hoodie but there is no hiding from this pain and this anger. I am not safe here, in my own room and on the phone to “family”. I wish it was a Wednesday and I could be safe at counselling. Not here. Not in danger of myself. I cannot control myself as I see the images flash by my face and I try to pay attention to the conversation; but it’s all that I can do to remain in my chair.

“You have to come, your Gran is 87 years old and she thinks she will die soon.”

How do you say no to that? I quite honestly hate her. I hate all of them right now. They didn’t protect me. I’m left here struggling. But am I so evil that I wouldn’t go and see her and stop her from worrying? Am I so evil that it has to be about me all of the time instead of about her? No. I’m not that evil. And so I agree to be picked up. That gives me half an hour.

It seems I’m taking a dip into the pool of depression. I am still crying violently as I open the packet to the razor. How the bloody hell do you even take them apart? There must be a way; they put them together after all. My fingers slip and slide as I manically try to pry the pieces apart. My crying becomes more violent and my movements more erratic as I constantly fail to pull it apart. I don’t have long to get this done. I have to do this now so I can rid myself of the emotional pain and concentrate on the physical pain for the evening. I grab my scissors, the new pair that I swore would only be used for paper, not for cutting my arms, and I attempt to pry the bottom from the razor. It’s attached as securely as my depression is to me. For a second, I think that I have it weakened so I hurry my movements.

“Fuck! Ouch! Oh shit!”

Pain surged through me like an electric shock. My thumb pulsed. My brain took a second to catch up. This wasn’t the pain I had planned. I had planned a methodical pain that I could see happening. I didn’t plan for the scissors to slice into the flesh of my thumb. Dropping everything, I rushed to the bathroom and ran my thumb under the cold water. A refreshingly icy blast hit my thumb and my brain slowly began to come back to its senses; the ones it had before the crushing depression. I never have the sense to call anybody when I’m in the depths of my depression. It’s never on the agenda and that’s something that really needs to change. One day it is sure to be my downfall. I call my friend and she calms me down. I am so thankful that she picked up and was able to make me laugh.

It’s ironic. I was trying to hurt myself and I hurt myself in the process. There was no longer any need to cut. I saw the blood seep out of my thumb and it wasn’t pretty; far from it. I felt sick and drained. Depression is draining. I knelt on the bathroom floor, my head in the crook of my arm, leaning on the sink, on the phone as I watched my hopes of a chilled out evening to focus on me, washing away down the drain.

I regained my composure, bandaged my thumb, washed my face and was ready to go. I stood outside and waited in the sweltering heat. I could have waited inside in the cool but I guess it’s just another form of punishment. The night went exactly how I thought it would. I was right to want to avoid it. There is no easy way to make yourself sick in somebody else’s house. I tried. There is a window you have, after eating, and the window determines how easy it is to make everything come back up. Sometimes, if you time it right, it’s easy. You don’t have to push as far or clench your stomach as much. Everything is simple and as quickly as the knife severs the tendons, the food comes up. If you leave it too long, it’s harder. The traffic jam gets stuck on the way out, the way it did travelling there. You push further and you choke; sometimes something comes up and that’s a lucky day. I left it too long. All that came up was blood. That’s never the intention. That’s too scary to deal with.

Does that mean that I won? The Monster was denied the chance of wallowing in the blood is so deeply craves. The food was not sacrificed in an adequate way. So, I won? It doesn’t feel like I won at all but I guess I did. I should be happy about that. I feel miserable. I am a failure. Maybe you can win and lose at the same time in the game of life. Maybe I’m a winner too. Is it winning if you’re just being “normal” or am I still losing because it shouldn’t be this hard to just stay alive and in one piece?

I don’t know what the night brings for me. I think that if I can write myself through this, I will be okay. I hope I will be okay.

Opening The Can

******TRIGGER WARNING****** 

 

I have come to realise that to have nobody is not the worst thing that could happen to me because I’ll always have myself. The worst thing is having people. But those people do not listen to me, they do not believe what I tell them; their every movement of the mouth is tainted with betrayal. I am left wondering, why, all of the time. I am left hating them. I am left with nothing to do but hurt myself, maim myself because that, at least, they could see. Nobody can deny that cuts exist although for the longest time I don’t believe that anybody saw all of the bruises or that my mum registered the bite marks on my bottom; the ones that were impossible for me to cause myself. I have no choice but to walk away from them because others tell me that I am important. I must look after me because nobody else will and I must not let The Monster consume me. I must walk away from them but that is not sad for me. What is sad is that they won’t notice that I am gone. Whether I have walked or jumped. But that’s okay. My life would be easier and so would theirs.

I put the phone down and my anger flares. I need to somewhere. Do something. Escape! Run! Get out! An endless stream of shouts in my head that cannot be tamed and like the lioness hunting her prey, I am helpless to the oncoming wreckage. I do not think I have a plan, at least not a plan to end my life; not today. I buy chips and consume them hungrily though I am far from hungry; it is not yet feeding time. I wander aimlessly through the park. I find myself walking to the spot in the woods where I so often make myself sick but I am walking the wrong way. I am taking the path towards it that I would normally take away from it. It is unfamiliar to me though I walk it so often; the destination is the same and the goal, to feel empty, is unchanged. I stumble through the wilderness feeling lost and inadequate.

Thoughts race through my mind. My anger gets bigger and blacker with every step that I take. Would it have hurt for the first question to have been, “how are you?” It does not take me long to be sick and I don’t have to force myself in the usual way because I am ready for this; I am ready to be emptied of anger, frustration, pain; all of the emotions that I cannot handle and that threaten to rip me apart. I want to feel nothing. The act is complete but now I feel stupid. Guilt and anger bubble inside of me, like Mount Etna, I am ready to erupt. I squash my coke can but that is not enough to take the anger away. My mind is consumed by it. I tear the can apart. The sharp edge looks inviting to me and before I realise what I am doing or have the power to stop it, I am repeatedly cutting myself using the razor sharp sides of the can. Once more it is my left hand that takes the blow. The blood seeps out and I am powerless to stop it. It is not pretty. There is nothing pretty about what I have done this evening. I deserve the needling pain in my hand for my stupidity. Letting them get to me and letting them win because I am hurting again is inexcusable and tantamount to letting My Monster win.

This is not how today was meant to go. I had come so far over the week since my willingness to end my life. I had come so far and as quickly as my mood shifted the night I was sent to A&E, I snapped today. I will not let them control me now when they did not save me from the pain, the trauma and the unbearable neglect. It was no war. There were no Nazis and Hitler did not invade. Nobody was killed. Comparatively my hell was nothing but it was My Hell, My War. My “brother” was My Hitler. My parents, the Nazis. I was expendable. I could be beaten and would not complain. I could be abused and would not put up a fight. It was My War. I was a victim of many forms of abuse as a child and I survived. What does that even mean? What is surviving? Still being alive? Spending my days wanting to end my life is not surviving. I don’t know what is but this cruel form of existence with constant flashbacks is no life to happily live.

I sit here and I wonder who held the most blame, Hitler for creating the hysteria or the Germans who went along with it? My “brother” for abusing me or me for never having the courage to speak up until it was too late? We were both children after all. Everything is justifiable when you’re a child.

I Cut and I Bleed

******TRIGGER WARNING******

            When I was a child and I heard the other kids in my class talk about people they knew that would ‘cut’ themselves; I never understood. I don’t think that I really knew what they meant. I saw how you could cut bread, meat, fish and even chocolate if you so wished but to cut yourself; that never made any sense to me. How do you go about doing that? Why would you do that? I had been hurt by somebody else every day for years; why would someone turn on themselves like that? For the longest time, I didn’t understand.

The day I wrote my teacher’s name on my left hand with my compass in maths was a day when I came close to understanding. Nothing seemed to make any sense to me right then. I had been told repeatedly to see my Head of Year every Tuesday at lunchtime so that she could make sure I was alright. I’m still not sure she really did anything beyond satisfying some small doubt within her. I’d already told her things were happening at home and nothing was done. I think this was my cry for help. I needed somebody to notice me; to see what was happening that I couldn’t voice. Telling the family secrets was and is forbidden; I’m sure they’ll come after me soon. I turned on myself in my time of need to show something concrete that the teachers could see. If they saw me doing this to myself, then maybe they’d believe what I was saying and I would get some help; somebody would take me away from that hellhole. But nobody did.

Now, I can see the beauty of cutting yourself. I have always loved colouring in. Cutting yourself is like colouring in your own body. There is a satisfaction in it that cannot adequately be explained. It was difficult for me the first few times that I cut myself. I didn’t know how to; how do you just go ahead and cut yourself? It’s not something that comes naturally when your every instinct is to protect your body from harm. I tried with scissors more than once but that doesn’t do a lot. It helped a little. I had some brief respite from the emotional pain ripping me apart.

It’s fascinating to me that a kitchen knife can so easily cut through an onion, with so many layers and a potato with such a solid interior but human skin? Human skin is tough; unyielding to the touch of the cool, steel blade. I cut at my arm like I would cut some bread but after an hour, I am still only just beneath the surface and it looks more like a burn than anything else. I did not realise than an hour had passed until the programme that I was watching finished. I had been methodically carving at my flesh, backwards and forwards; backwards and forwards. When the hour had passed, I put the knife away and I cleaned my cuts, bandaged my arm like anybody would. The black ball of pain inside of my heart had become a little smaller. It is harder to feel emotional pain when you have a pain that is physical; a pain that can be seen and understood by all and yet I had felt nothing when I cut into my arm so violently for so long. There was no pain. The physical pain had cancelled out the emotional pain and I was left hollow, like the tree hit by lightning with no hope of growth. I was there and I existed but I was not me. There was no feeling. There was no light and there was no dark. I existed but I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I was numb to the pain and numb to the world. I can only hope I passed out after that.

The real danger for me right now is that I am not frantic and I am not fidgety. I am calmly contemplating the next brutal act I will perform on myself at the bequest of My Monster. He has left me alone during the days and haunted my dreams with his face and his soul-destroying voice. He knows how to get to me. He knows that the intense fear will be greater inside me if I am calm when he speaks to me. I am better able to protect myself against him when I fidget because there is a part of me that is still in control; a part of me that knows cutting myself is stupid and wrong. When I am calm, I have already rationalised the act. I can see the relief from the pain that eats me alive; from the unheard cries caught in my throat. I can feel the horror swell within in me because I know what must be done and I know that it is well deserved for being such a failure; for being a disgrace to my family; for being born at all.

When I am calm, I welcome the sweet release of the blade against my flesh. I welcome the sight of the blood as it trickles down my arm and into the sink. As the blood mixes with the water, it swirls and the patterns that appear are pretty; worthy of being remembered, somebody should capture that moment. It does not scare me that I will lose blood and it does not scare me that I could go too far. Whatever happens will be whatever is deserved. There must always be blood loss in a war and while I cannot reach him to bleed him to the death he so surely deserves; the blood loss must be mine.

Trapped Cries

******TRIGGER WARNING******

“Shit! It’s raining!” is something I say far too much during the summer months and as luck would have it, my washing is predictably outside. As surely as my clothes become heavier with the dampening rain; my mood plummets. I race downstairs, throw my shoes on and rush into the oncoming torrent of pelting abuse the rain offers to me. There is no easy way to do this quickly. Grab clothing, unpeg on both sides, throw clothing into basket, throw pegs into bag, rinse and repeat the necessary amount of times. This process that I seem to fulfil every weekend during our delightful British weather casts my mood into a shadowy dungeon. I am easily frustrated as I try to hurry my movements; as I try to stop an oncoming panic attack. The rain drenches me like cancer overrides the body; quickly, angrily and with no reprieve in sight. I am wet enough to need a change of clothing and I’m not blind to the irony of the situation but it’s not funny. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the kitchen knife as I walk past the counter and I know there is a part of me that has been awakened by the fresh frustrations and this part of me now wants to cut.

There is no reason for me to blame myself for this new situation. The weather changes and it is sporadic at best in the UK. I know this. My mood so often shifts like the weather. It is so predictably unpredictable. - From sunny to stormy in a split second. The anger surges through me and it feels electric; I could spark an entire war with this anger that I feel. I cast aside my washing as I enter my room. There is no point in attempting to dry it here. This room cannot house such a saturated mess in need of such warmth. It is not lost on me that my clothes are now like my heart.

My legs shake violently as I try to maintain the composure to write this. Putting a barrier up to the anger is difficult and it requires so much of my strength that I am worried I will not stop the panic in time. I am panicking a lot. My plan for the washing did not go my way. I was taken out of my comfort zone as swiftly as ice melting in a fire and this panic, though familiar to me, is not something that I can suppress all that easily. It is a panic linked with my PTSD. Air rips through my body, grating at my insides as I try to breathe and with crushing speed, I am 12 years old again.

I am standing outside the back door of my childhood home in my swimming costume as the sun streams down on me. It is the first warm day in a while and the patio warms my bare feet. My swimming costume is a mixture of black and bright blue; my favourite colour. I’m excited to go in the pool that my Dad has put up in the back garden. I am happy. The weekend is here and I have done all of my homework and household chores. I can just swim in the pool and relax just like a normal 12 year old.

I don’t make it to the pool. My brother comes outside, which confuses me because I didn’t know that he was home. Maybe he just got back from somewhere. I don’t really know and I don’t really care. My brother and I argue an awful lot. I hate him; quite honestly not that anybody would see or believe that from me.

“Let’s play a game”, he says to me. I figure that’s okay because it’s sunny; maybe he wants to play a water game or something; I don’t even know what games you’d play in a pool this small. He is 15. I am 12. He goes back inside to the kitchen while I wait for him, longingly looking at the pool. The pool is always best on the first day that it is put up, before the flies have had their chance at swimming in it and the leaves have settled upon the glistening surface. When the pool is full of flies, it always reminds me of the outside swimming pools in France; they’re always full of unsuspecting, dead flies when we arrive for our holidays. That always makes me feel sick. Our pool isn’t like that today though. There are no flies. The water is unsullied; just waiting for me.

My brother comes back from the kitchen after a minute or two and he is holding the bag with the pegs in it. I am confused because I don’t know of a game you can play with pegs and we don’t have any washing to put on the line. I’m ready to swim in the pool; not play an imaginary game. I don’t ask him what the game is because I figure he’ll tell me soon and I’m not going to waste my words on this question. I stand and stare at him, waiting.

The game is not a game. The game is an act by him. He thinks that calling it a game makes it okay. “It’s only a game” is such a common phrase. This is not a game and this is not okay but my words are trapped in my throat and I don’t know how to escape from this. He is older than me and he is bigger than me. I have felt the sharp, quick thud of his trainers against my body before; his hands have struck me many times and I have no wish for this to be repeated. I am frozen in time. I am frozen and terrified. My breath catches.

“Let’s see how many pegs we can put on you”. He is smiling. This is not funny to me. I don’t want to smile. I don’t understand this. I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t be touching me there at all. I wasn’t sure when I was 6 or even when I was 10 but now I am 12 and I’m pretty sure this isn’t right. There is nothing that I can do though. I am powerless. There’s a question in my mind but it doesn’t invite the same excitement within me as it does him. I have a rising panic within me as I wonder how many pegs can be attached to my private parts. I do not ask why. I do not say no. I do not kick, scream, yell or fight against him. It is like I am drowning in quick sand with nobody to pull me out and no branch in sight.

“Lift your swimming costume out of the way, right there.”

“Hold this for me.”

“Just pull that out of the way while I put this here.”

“I said hold it out of the way! Don’t let go of it, idiot!”

“There. All finished. Let go of the skin now and let me count them.”

The answer is more than 10. The answer is that it hurts. I am mortified. I wish I could die right now. I do not want to be alive like this. He is proud of his achievement. He walks away, smiling; leaving me to shamefully remove these objects. I do not cry. I do not look. I take them off one by one; ignoring the pain. I wash them in the kitchen sink. I go to the toilet and I get on with my day.

This is one of those things that happen to me. There is nobody to ask for help. There is nothing to do but pretend it hasn’t bothered me.

I never stopped to think about my back garden being an open space. I didn’t stop to wonder if the people in the nursing home behind our house could see what happened or whether my neighbours were looking out of the window. There was a blind spot at my childhood house. If you were to stand on the patio in a certain place, you wouldn’t be seen by anybody looking out of any of the windows at the back of the house. We weren’t stood in that place. Anybody could have seen. But if anybody did; nobody did anything to help.