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For this precious body is the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever evolving forms of media, harassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn’t enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little—a million billion never-ending details which all point to the solitary girl—to every solitary girl—and say: DESTROY YOURSELF
And, in the end, I can tell you exactly what cutting is about, because it's not nearly as mysterious as anyone thinks: It is not about attention, or pity, or “self-harm,” which is a terribly stupid term by the way. No. It is about one thing. It is about control. And I am filled with twenty-six years of female rage and a deadly determination to take mine back.
Though I had never set out to display them, I made my cuts in particularly intimate areas of my body that would only be known to the next person I allowed too close in a moment of forgetfulness. I wanted that person to know, and before it was too late, that I was crazy and scary and should be backed away from immediately. I didn’t want to have to talk about it anymore. Just like a good novel, show, don’t tell.
I wore the same clothes I always did, and it didn’t occur to me that, because they could see an inch of a scratch that ran lower down my thigh than my skirt did, I was making the people around me extremely uncomfortable. It didn’t occur to me because I wasn’t ashamed of what I had done, which is not to say that I was proud of it—I wasn’t. It was just something I did, because I needed to. For me. Just for me.
It’s difficult to tell someone that they shouldn’t be defined by their illness. Or, rather, it’s easy to tell someone, but it’s difficult to hear. It is impossible not to become defined by your illness, even to yourself, when everything you do is so closely intertwined with it. There is virtually no part of your life that you live like other people do—even the smallest detail is adjusted in some way—a way very possibly imperceptible from the outside. And then there is always the question of what you are allowed to define yourself by, if not by something that affects you more than any other
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and, seemingly out of nowhere, and with no detectable provocation, beginning to cry without being able to stop. I could not be consoled, because I wasn’t sad. I was scared. Terrified. Panicked. And I could not think of a single reason why.
if this is a manic state, then why isn’t it any fun, because it used to be, or maybe it didn’t and I just said it was after the fact because I thought that’s what people wanted to hear, that at least I wasn’t suicidally miserable all the time, that for a month out of every year I really was fun without faking it, that I really, really was and so you shouldn’t be afraid to love me because I won’t always be like this, and my body is starting to shake and I have that awful feeling of jumping out of my skin chest tingling throat choking on my own nervousness and my body feels wrong and my brain is
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Nothing in my life has ever made me want to commit suicide more than people’s reaction to my trying to commit suicide.
But, with attempted suicide, there is no such desire to understand, no such sympathy—only anger and contempt. And disgust. Always disgust.
And yet . . . and yet . . . a leech tastes blood and then it dies. A bee stings only once. Perhaps some of us are simply more willing than others to admit that we, too, are born harboring within us that which can also annihilate us. I am not behaving aberrantly—self-destruction is completely natural. No one dies of old age.
And what of the “me” that exists outside of my imagination? Can that which never lives ever die? Or is that simply one more thing that I am incapable of? I wish that my walls were brick so that I could not see the life outside of me, that which I am not allowed to partake of. I am tired of my glass walls, and even more tired of questions.
I myself have not been successful in my attempts upon my own life, but I would swear that there are bits and pieces of me dying every day. I am full of suicides, of rotting corpses, of brittle skeletons, infecting the living parts of me. I am dead, though I do not die.
When I am manic, I am so far ahead of the herd that I can’t see them behind me. When I am depressed, I am too sick to keep up with the herd at all. Why can’t I just run with them?
I’m talking about me, and every other person who is not quite sure who they are once you take away the disease. It’s all very well to say, “Oh, don’t worry, that’s not you, that’s your illness.” But what, then, am I left with? What is me, and how can I be sure?
Sometimes I don’t eat for days simply because I want a proper excuse to feel as empty inside as I do.
and have completely lost the desire to sleep in their own beds, the floor having been quite as comfortable as they feel they deserve, which isn’t very much, as it turns out.
So, then, when you feel the blood pouring out of you, and you begin to see the things you were told to look for, you become frightened at being alone. You haven’t had a moment’s peace in months, but now you’re afraid to be alone. Ridiculous, isn’t it? If you don’t spend a Sunday night curled up in a ball and crying on the bathroom floor, what on Earth will you do with it?
Suicide may not be self-preservation, but it is self-defense. By taking your own life, you are simply attempting to defend yourself against whatever assailants are attacking you.
And, aha! Victim. That’s just it! You die, you’re a victim. “Suicide victim." We’ve all heard that. You live, you’re a stupid, selfish, cruel person. I’ve been a bad girl. A bad, bad dog.
To do so would only be to conform to the generally accepted version of reality that we all agree upon only to avoid looking strange. Because, even if you’re brave, looking strange is exhausting, and, despite what we want to tell ourselves, it hurts . . . it really hurts . . . until one day when it doesn’t.
Your voice is the most important tool in helping our Asylum grow. Your voice is far more powerful than you may think. Your voice is everything.
