9/8/08

I guess I’m bitter.  Maybe a better word would be pissed.

Continuing somewhat from the previous entry, I mentioned that I faked a recovery, and my therapist bought it.  She is only one person in a long line of people who should have fucking done something.

When I was 8 years old, I tried to sprain my ankles jump roping.  In class, I had fantasies about monsters coming up out of the ground to rip me into pieces.  I threw myself down staircases.  I overdosed when I was 10.  I tried to hang myself when I was younger than that.  But, no one ever really noticed.  I’ve hated myself as long as I can remember.  I’m not entirely sure where my self-loathing came from, but I have an idea.  Part of it was my peers, who mocked me endlessly.  But part of it was religious.  I had a friend who was very Christian, and in second grade she converted me.  I went to Sunday school and learned about how god loves us, and god protects us, and how god will triumph over evil.  But still, in classes, I was belittled and abused.  Why wasn’t god protecting me?  Unless…unless I wasn’t worthy of god’s love.  Because I was the evil over which he would triumph.  Children don’t understand metaphor, subtle nuances.  I saw my current situation as a direct result of the flaws in my very soul.  God was punishing me, and even if I didn’t know why, I deserved it.

So at the ripe age of 7, I was convinced that God hated me because there was something inherently evil about me, and no matter what I did I could never escape it.

Where were my parents on this one, you might be wondering.  Well, I wonder that too, now.  Certainly there’s nothing normal about a child trying to hang herself, but they seemed to think there was.  And sometimes, I fucking hate them for it.  At that age, I wasn’t responsible for my own well being.  I was a child!

Self mutilation is a tool of many functions for me.  Initially, it was to gain strength over my emotions through physical pain.  Soon, though, I sought to alleviate my eternal feelings of inadequacy through physical pain.  “Yeah, I suck, I’m an abomination of humanity, but if I’m bleeding, doesn’t that make it better?  DOESN’T IT?”.  At 11 years old, I found the road to what I believed was my salvation.

So, from 11 to 15  years of age, I mostly cut my legs and upper arms.  When I was 14, I started doing more damage to my forearms, and one day one of my friends noted, “whoa, that’s a lot of cuts.  You’re not a cutter, ARE YOU?”  Now, you have to understand, cutters were people that we mocked as weak and pathetic attention whores—WE were better than that.   So of course I denied it.  That was easy. 

A few years later, when my doctor was putting staples into my right leg, she wanted to know why I did what I did.  I carefully evaded the question—I can’t even remember what bullshit I spewed.  But she dropped it.

My therapist, you’d think, would have noticed I wasn’t okay.  And by this age (16), I guess I had some say over my own health.  But I was still a minor, really just an ignorant child.  And I carefully evaded her questions as well, not believing I was worth 60 minutes of her time, and soon she dropped it, too.

No one ever mentioned it again.

When I was 18 years old and about to graduate high school, my mother burst into my room unexpectedly to tell me something and caught me in the act, with the straight razor in my hand, and all she did was look at me and say, “are you doing that again?” and walked back out.

It is now the end of summer, 2008.  I have not worn a t-shirt since 2005, nor have I worn a bathing suit since 2001.  I avoid showing any skin, even in extremely hot weather.  I recently suffered through 90+ degree days in long sleeves.  This is almost a dead giveaway of a self-injurer, but no one has ever noticed.  Not my sister, who I love dearly.  Not my friends.  Not my parents.  Not a single co-worker.  And I know it’s not their job to stop me, now, because now I’m a big girl and this problem is all my own.  But still, I resent them for all the times they should have done something.  All of them.  Where the fuck were they?  Yeah, maybe I shut them out, but I. was. a. child. 

I wear their ignorance on my skin.