The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

by Emilie Autumn

It does seem a bit backwards to me that I must treat myself as a precious object when nobody else does.

But I am not allowed to forgive myself, even if I wanted to. I am not allowed to forgive myself, because no one will forgive me.

Exactly how I feel.

For cutting is just like crying . . . so much easier to start than to stop.

Yet there is also that element of entertainment—of wonder at the almost sensual pain during the cut, at the speed with which the crimson pearls rise to the surface, at the moment one waits in breathless anticipation to see whether, when the blood does come, it will be in the form of a thin, red line, or will it actually spill out in droplets, and then still more wonder at how the wound rushes and weeps, suddenly impatient,

with someone that we trust.

Ourselves

(which really does seem to make people curiously angry)

no, they have all been exclusively to do with how disgusting it is. How perversely disgusting it is. How perversely disgusting it is to them.

I am also committing the crime of property damage,

reality of just how much blood one girl not only bleeds but sees during the course of her life, and that’s not counting childbirth, my friends, which is on a whole other planet.

I simply believe that for friends, family, doctors, lovers, all of those surrounding a person who has cut herself to behave as though she had committed a crime, a disgusting, disgusting, disgusting crime, a crime against herself, and a crime of the worst kind because it damages her body, her precious, precious body, is a bit ridiculous.

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 Y...

I am doing it not to die.

The trouble with forgiving people is that it makes writing terrible things about them so much more difficult.

This was never supposed to be a way of life . . . it was about survival.

But, is it not strange that the only things I don’t feel guilty about are the very things everyone else has put me on trial for?

I know that what I was doing was madness in all eyes but mine, yet I wasn...

especially not in my legs

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.

Would I cut myself now? I don’t know. When I did, it was for a good reason. If I did again, I’m sure it w...

I suppose that the cutting is really beside the point—it is the reason for cutting that I would...

any time you’re truly angry—and with good and clear reason, you will be told that you are only feeling as you are because of your illness. Every time your boyfriend is being an ass and you call him on it, this is what you will hear, so get used to it:

“Have you taken your medication today?”

It is the eternal equivalent of being asked if it’s your “time of the month” every time you get upset. If this doesn’t make you want to kill yourself, I don’t know what will.

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.

I still own my heart, which I know because it hurts so much.

I have always wished for the ability to forget—to let harsh memories soften over time,

and I can’t take them back.

I know that the moment stockill I put down this pen and stop writing I have to make a choice

I’m not contagious.

we, too, are born harboring within us that which can also annihilate us.

Is there only one form of suicide, or is it possible that various other unseen yet equally important parts of us can die, whilst our bodies, our other parts, live on?

Why can’t I just run with them?

doesn’t make the disease any less real. There is another thing that troubles me, and this is the way in which it is often said that a particularly unattractive part of a person we are acquainted with is in fact not part of that person at all, but merely a result of their illness, which may be entirely true, and yet, by ascribing the offending behavior to the illness and not to the sufferer, we learn a great deal about the illness, but nothing whatever about the person.

Untreated, or unsuccessfully treated, depression is medically considered to be a terminal illness.

Depression is a rather rude house guest; Depression rarely calls ahead to see if it’s a good time, and Depression never arrives alone. Depression brings its friends—Despair, Self-Injury, and Suicide—wherever

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.

looking strange is exhausting,