It wasn’t the first time I’d cut, it wasn’t even the worst, but I still found myself biking to the emergency room at 1:30 on a Sunday morning. My original intention had been to call my company’s Employee Assistance Program so that they would help me find a counselor. I wanted to get back on antidepressants; I wanted to spend fewer nights crying in the dark with a box cutter. While my intentions were clear, though, I had no ability to make plans, let alone to see them through. I was cutting nearly every day and aghast at the relentless tailspin of my life. The worst part of depression is always the dizzying moment when I remember that rock-bottom is a myth; there’s no end unless I carve it out myself.
I don’t remember exactly what happened the day of my emergency room trip, but the basic shape of my life was something like this: I was working as a manager in a high-turnover call center, making too much money to do something which I felt was irrelevant to society and in which I took no pride. I lived alone in the town where I’d graduated from college with an English degree, another “accomplishment” that I felt ambivalent toward on the best days and angry with on the worst. Almost a year prior I’d stopped taking the latest in a string of antidepressants, and I’d spent the intervening months socially isolating myself to get high and binge-watch Netflix with my cat.
So I called the Employee Assistance Program, an over-the-phone counseling service offered by my employer. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I got was a polite, insistent representative named Mike. He was almost certainly reading from a script when he told me to go to the emergency room. I’ve worked in call centers, too, and I recognize the hollow concern that comes from repeating the same handful of sentences dozens of times a day. Regardless of his sincerity, I would have done anything that he asked. My own decisions, when I was even capable of making them, were a clear disaster. I wanted to let someone else be in charge.
When I told the woman who checked me in to the ER that I’d biked over, she gave me a sympathetic look that made me want to disappear. Instead I left her my keys and my clothes and my cell phone and settled in to wait for a doctor.
***
The first time I cut was in high school. I don’t remember why, just that I scraped a dull pair of manicure scissors across my forearm until it bled. I didn’t flaunt my injuries but neither did I make any special effort to hide them; my mom noticed the scratches on my arms and made me promise to stop, and by calling me out at strategic times, my brother used them as leverage to get our parents off of his back. No one took my self injury seriously, and least of all me. Cutting is the purview of angsty teenagers whose problems are readily blamed on their age, and I’d graduated from college before I finally accepted that my self injury and depression were terminal, not the folly of a misguided youth.
Almost no one knows that I have been cutting for over a decade because I know that cutting is used as a punchline or misunderstood as a failed attempt at suicide; it is almost always seen as a cry for attention. None of that is right, but it’s so predominant that it’s choked out real discourse about self injury. I never mention cutting, even if I’ve finally learned to talk about depression. I can’t find the words to express that my preferred coping method is taking a razor to my own skin, and there is no reason to say that anyway. I know better than anyone how little I want the kind of attention that cutting brings, although I’m not sure whether it’s the scorn I dread, or the burden I’d be putting on my friends.
***
I’m forever trying to answer a question that I don’t give anyone the opportunity to ask: Why do I cut? It’s almost like a cigarette craving. I feel trapped in my own skin, I can’t focus, and I can’t sit still. I’m not usually violent but I want to hit someone in the teeth; I want to tear my skin off and shatter my bones. I want to cry, not because I’m sad but because I’m filled with toxic energy that needs to escape. I answer it with razors or scissors or safety pins, box cutters, anything heavy enough to leave bruises. Once I got a piercing, thanks to the coincidence of payday with my directionless rage, and I’m drawn to the giddy high of big tattoos, the needles in my skin and the permanent marks they leave.
I can’t rid myself of that noxious energy, but I’ve tried to relieve the pressure with more socially acceptable forms of self-destruction. I smoke cigarettes as a personal reward for good behavior and as a palliative to the myriad anxieties of day-to-day life. I wander my neighborhood for hours at night when I should be at home asleep. I drink a lot of whiskey. Comparatively, cutting is better for me than any of those things: it is purely cosmetic and unlikely to give me cancer or rot my liver, but the stigma associated with self injury is different. I may be occasionally terrified at my own propensity for self destruction, but it’s just a backdrop for my life: it is always there but it’s only gut-wrenching when I consciously think about it. Despite that, I understand how frightening it can be see the physical manifestations of someone else’s disease.
I’ve quit cutting time and time again, and now I look at it like an addiction. Even if you’re currently sober, you’re an alcoholic for life, and I’m a cutter even if I’m not actively bleeding. I will always have these scars, even if I lie about them whenever someone notices.
***
When I was younger, I did not have to take my cutting seriously. Everyone I knew and all of the media I consumed were complicit in letting me believe that nothing I thought mattered and that nothing I felt was real. I didn’t identify as a cutter, even to myself; I identified as a teenager. Later I saw a therapist through my college health center, and she nearly convinced me that my depression was situational and that a prescription would set me right. I’ve taken Prozac, Celexa and Effexor, and after the emergency room, after I realized how far down I could slip without bottoming out, I went back and got a new prescription for Wellbutrin. They had different doses and different side effects and I cut while I was on every one of those pills.
The last time I cut was nearly two months ago. I left my friends at the bar so I could be alone and I stayed up until dawn, chain-smoking in my room with a towel wedged under the door. When I woke up with swollen eyes and a sore throat there was blood on my sheets from slashes that I didn’t clean or bandage. This is how it is now: I cut more infrequently, but I can’t view it as progress. It’s not the first time I’ve slowed down. The urge seems to have whims of its own.
This winter I turned twenty-six years old. I haven’t lived with my parents since I was eighteen; I put myself through college and I have a job. There is no reference point to tell me what it means that I still cut, however infrequently.
***
I don’t remember how long I waited at the ER. The room was dim and dingy; I wore paper clothes and sat on a bench built into the wall. There was no clock but there was an old issue of US Weekly that I was too wired to read. When the doctor came to see me, he just cleaned me up and tried to reassure me that I wasn’t wasting his time or the hospital’s resources with my benign injuries. I didn’t believe him, but what else could he do? He wasn’t meant to provide the long-term care that I needed.
It was after four in the morning when I left with bandaged legs and a $500 bill that my insurance company wouldn’t pay. I biked slowly, weighed down by the knowledge that I’d wake up in a few hours to go back to work, and that having done so once I’d keep slogging through my life indefinitely. It was an epiphany, it just wasn’t the one that I wanted.
Tags: ashleigh brantingham, health, mental illness, self-harm
Thanks for this Ashleigh – I hope you’re doing well.
This was such an emotional read; I went through the teenager/cutting years too, and I can TOTALLY see where that comes from, and the way you described this whole ordeal just really struck a chord within me. I acknowledge how difficult it is to write about these things, and I am just so grateful that someone does. it’s always an inspiration to have someone express emotions you yourself are grappling with.
Thank you so much for talking about this. You’re right that it’s such a difficult and strange thing to talk about, even with friends who suffer from other mental illnesses. People don’t take it seriously, or view it as a cry for attention, so no one mentions it at all. The cigarette addiction is the best analogy I’ve heard, and it’s absolutely true. I haven’t committed any serious act of self-harm in close to 5 years, but I think about it almost daily and deeply crave it in times of stress, anxiety, or sorrow. Just reading this I found myself digging my nails into my arms hard enough to leave marks. I hope you’re doing better and someone is helping you to find healthier coping methods, as impossible as that seems sometimes.
Thank you so much for this piece; I relate to it WAY too much. I’ve never gone to the ER for cutting, but I have some pretty ugly scars from cuts that I should have gone to the ER for. I cut for over eight years, and I haven’t in about a year and a half? But I still get that panic-stricken feeling where I need to do SOMETHING to escape the screaming in my head. The thing about cutting is I never felt better afterwards, just emptier; it’s cathartic. It can be such a relief to feel less when your feelings get too great to be contained.
Only upside to cutting is that I have zero regrets about either of my tattoos- my body’s already covered in scars but these ones are pretty!
The thing about cutting is I never felt better afterwards, just emptier; it’s cathartic.
I think that’s the thing for me, too – feeling empty is so much better than the alternative.
I’m glad you haven’t cut in so long, though! That’s a big accomplishment.
Thank you for writing this.. I have so much respect for you, it was really brave and hope you’re doing okay!
The following is not to draw attention to me or to ‘downplay’ your experience with cutting; I just want to explain why this resonated so much with me:
It’s almost eerie how much your story and mine are alike, down to the lonely nightly ER-wait. I have so much respect for you – like you I’m almost 2 months cut-free, and basically replacing it with cigarettes, and using it as some kind of fucked up reward. I have no idea why I cut exactly. It was/is an addiction, and I felt/feel very detached from it – it’s just something I do/did to cope with life.
Anyway, ramble blah, main point: thank you so much and good luck!
Thank you for this. I love the writing on mental illness The Toast has been sharing lately – most narratives I see around end with a fix or a cure, which seem to be about as mythical as rock bottom. I can’t fully understand what it’s like to live with something that impacts your life this way, but this window into your life and your struggles (and the lives of the other authors The Toast has published) makes it easier to empathize. It means a lot to me, especially when trying to relate to loved ones with mental illness.
Thanks for the kind words 🙂 I’m trying to learn to be productive with all of this, since I can’t seem to get rid of it.
Did you read The Jumble of Chronic Mental Illness that was posted a couple of days ago? I loved it.
I think it was actually another commenter here who said it earlier, but I hate how we dismiss things that teenagers do as “cries for attention,” as if somehow we know they’re getting all the attention they need and anything else is selfish. (not to audit the author’s approach to her own experience – just the way society spends so much time & energy shitting on teenagers (& especially teenage girls) and then turns around and tells them their problems don’t mean anything)
Many, many years ago, on a Tamora Pierce forum, there was a thread about cutting and self-injury, and – perhaps unsurprisingly – there were a lot of us with that experience, and… also unsurprisingly, someone popped up to talk about the difference between “real” cutters, who they pitied, and “attention” cutters, who they despised, and the admin, who I love dearly, went off.
I’m paraphrasing: If people are harming themselves, they are in trouble and should be helped. I do not care why. Their reasoning is no less valid because it comes from an issue with attention than from an issue with depression. If someone is hurting so badly from neglect in their life that they feel the need to injure themselves as a cry to the people around them, maybe someone should be listening. There is no “you must be this depressed to ride” sign before a therapist’s office.
” If someone is hurting so badly from neglect in their life that they feel the need to injure themselves as a cry to the people around them, maybe someone should be listening.”
#preach
yesssss thisssssssssssss.
Maybe, just maybe, when someone’s making a cry for help or attention it’s…. because they need those things?
I’m paraphrasing: If people are harming themselves, they are in trouble and should be helped. I do not care why. Their reasoning is no less valid because it comes from an issue with attention than from an issue with depression. If someone is hurting so badly from neglect in their life that they feel the need to injure themselves as a cry to the people around them, maybe someone should be listening.
I agree with this so much.
A thousand times this.
I had a realization like that when I was in my early twenties, when I counted my scars and realized I’d nearly doubled them in six months. At first I was horrified, and then something in my brain went, “That’s not much, really. If it was *this number,* maybe that’d be something to be upset about.” And I realized, “Oh, wait. It’s never going to be enough for that part of my mind. There is no enough.” That was the point where I started making deliberate efforts to reduce it (which, like you, I’d done before but without long term success). I made Wednesdays my self-injury free day (after experimentation, determining that “Wednesday” meant from the time I woke up until the time I fell asleep, otherwise I’d be sitting there at 11:59 PM counting seconds to midnight). I eventually moved on to a rule that I had to wait four hours after I was triggered to actually cut. Other things. I learned the craving would go away, or maybe the craving started to learn to go away. It took another good year, but eventually cutting was incidental instead of obsessive.
And, then, four years, three months, and two days after I’d been entirely SI free, I started hitting myself again, which turned into burning, which moved into cutting. One incident each. After the last one, I realized I was looking forward to the next time, and that set off alarm bells for me and I got myself to a therapist right quick. And it’s been about six years since then (other than one incident of self-hitting, which I don’t quite count as much as the others? Maybe that’s wrong. I don’t know.)
It’s an addiction. But if it’s an addiction, I am in recovery, and I know that’s possible and better than not being there.
“And I realized, “Oh, wait. It’s never going to be enough for that part of my mind. There is no enough.” ”
That rings so true to me. I’ve been struggling with depression and self harm, and it’s amazing the extent to which I convince myself that it’s not a real problem. I feel awful all the time? It’s just because I’m lazy and don’t do enough. It’s not like I’m self harming, right? I am self harming? God I’m pathetic, it’s just me pretending to have a problem. After all, I only did it a few times, and that was with a razor, so it wasn’t even deep. I’m cutting every day, sometimes with a knife, and the cuts are getting deeper? Well, I clean all the wounds and make sure they don’t get infected. Besides, it’s not as if I’m suicidal.
It’s amazing – and terrifying – how hard your brain works to convince you that nothing is wrong, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I was reading this and I was like… She works at Netflix. I’m sure of it. I don’t work there anymore, but the way you described it was too real. Imagine my surprise to scroll down to the bottom and find that you live in Portland. It may be some other call center. We have a lot. But that one’s the worst. I raise my headset in salute.
Haha, I did not work at Netflix but from what I’ve heard about Netflix the place I worked was really similar.
Thank you. I’ve typed then deleted about three other comments attempting and failing to articulate why this article means so much to me today, but all of them started with that stock phrase of gratitude, so I guess I’ll have to just leave it there.
One of the things that’s hardest to explain is that it’s an addiction. The only person in 23 years who’s understood that explanation was a friend of mine who’s a [sober] alcoholic and a priest. But… it is. It’s a cry in your blood, a burning rush, a craving that will not be silenced. If alcohol quelled the rush even a little bit, I’d have fallen into that, separate but also terrible, pit years ago.
thank you
Wow, this was really emotionally affecting. Thank you for sharing your experience; I hope it helps people who don’t self-harm to be a little more open minded in terms of understanding the motivations and having empathy for people who do.
“I’ve quit cutting time and time again, and now I look at it like an addiction. Even if you’re currently sober, you’re an alcoholic for life, and I’m a cutter even if I’m not actively bleeding. I will always have these scars, even if I lie about them whenever someone notices.”
This is so true. Once you start self-injuring you have to deal with that forever. I took up self-injury as a teenager–I think because I didn’t know how to deal with being a masochist and thought it was better to be an Angsty Teen than a Sick Pervert (thanks, purity culture!)–and managed to get myself into basically unhelpful therapy and “quit” a year later. For the most part, I don’t do things that leave permanent marks anymore. But I still bite, I scratch, I pull my hair; I left a binder clip pinched onto my pinky for ten minutes the other day, and the mark was gone within minutes and I was frustrated with that…
It turns into something you have to know about yourself, something you have to live with. I don’t think it will ever go away.
🙁 I hope things get better for you so you don’t feel like doing those things.
I think this is a function of a lot of unhealthy coping behaviors – once you’ve opened that door it’s there as an option for the rest of your life. Better to not start, if you can help it, and then you won’t have it to turn to in dark times. Not helpful advice once one has started, but maybe someone will read this article and these comments and decide to not try it.
I really REALLY wish medical personnel, including mental health personnel, know how to handle self mutilation. It’s one of the manifestations of my depression and anxiety, and flared up hugely while I was in college. I dragged myself to the mental health facility, spoke to a recently graduated brand new therapist, explained what was going on (loooootttttts of self harm, severe depression, hadn’t been to class in two semesters, thought about killing myself daily) and watched his body language close up and shut me out (leaning far away from me, folding his arms, etc). He then said GOSH WOW GEE GOLLY there was NOTHING he could do for me but DANG was I really self actualized GOOD LUCK!!!! which made me so furious I took action for the first time in about a year, dropped out of school, and moved in with a friend of mine. I probably should have been hospitalized. I was in an extremely dark place. But failing that, he should have helped me get back on the drugs that had helped me before and worked with me and the college to get me put on probation. He, like most employees of the college, did jack all and wound up directly hurting me instead of doing his job. I’m probably going to be angry about that forever.
I’m 35 now, though, and despite living through post partum depression, I haven’t cut or banged or anything else in a long time. For me, pulling through the last dregs of puberty and getting established, and also working on my body image (I’m super fat, but not longer hate and abhor my body) and getting control of my disordered eating helped a lot. Most of the people I know who are in their 30s kind of… I don’t want to say “grow out of” self harm because that sounds like trivializing it, but… are able to get some more control and put distance between themselves and the actions. So hopefully you younger folks can just… stick it out, and it gets better. I still get the urges sometimes during high anxiety moments but… they are far more fleeting than they used to.
I read somewhere that if a person’s actively suicidal, if they’re unable to act on it within a ten minute window they won’t do it. When I had urges to self harm, they’d stick around for DAYS until I was able to act on them, occupying the front part of my brain, intrusive.
Thanks for writing this, Ashleigh. This was really hard to read for all the right reasons. I hope you get to a more peaceful place.
Thank you so much for writing this. I don’t think I have ever read something that spoke this honestly about self-harm. This resonated deeply in my bones, in each one of my scars. It is an addiction, and it helped me to understand myself so much more when I thought of it that way. No matter the mental processes behind why I cut myself, the physical reality is exactly like having a cigarette or taking a drink.
Good luck to you, and to each one of the commenters who are also trying to recover. xx
Wow. Thank you for this. My little sister (19) was (or still is? I haven’t lived with her in 2 years) a cutter and my parents never really took it seriously. A week ago she landed in the ER because with alcohol poisoning. I’m really worried and my other sister and parents are like: she’s bored/she’s a teenager. Do you think there’s something I can do or say to help her or to help her GET real help?
have to add, to be fair: my mom IS worried. She just thinks that if she doesn’t ask for help, there’s no point in dragging her to therapy. But I think that cutting and drinking & smoking pot until you pass out is probably a cry for help. I dunno. Any advice?
Oh jeeze, that’s really hard. I don’t necessarily have the best advice to offer on this – sometimes the best you can do is let someone know that you’re there for them if they ever need anything. And they still might decide that they don’t need/want anything from you. It’s hard to force it. I hope that your sister is okay, though. That’s a really terrible situation to be in, for all of you.
It might be very difficult for your sister to ask directly, verbally, for help. I think that’s a good observation on your part, majosevia. It might be easier for her if someone else broached the topic first. Has she been asked whether she would like help?
A script for that could go a bit like this:
[Sister], I was really worried to hear about your trip to the ER. I love you, and I’m so thankful you got treatment and were able to recover. But I’ve been worried about you for a long time, actually. You don’t seem okay. [Mention the cutting and/or drug use in a nonaccusing way.] I want the best for you, and I think seeing a therapist could help you feel better. Is that something you’d like to try?”
Then listen to what she has to say.
You know your sister better than this internet stranger, so you have a better feeling for whether this sort of discussion with her would be productive. I think even if she rejects therapy, at the very least this conversation would let her know that someone is taking her and her problems seriously.
(Side note: She might have some misconceptions about therapy.
A lot of society thinks therapy is, figuratively, the place where bad puppies are sent, the place where the therapist rolls up a newspaper (a DSM 4?) and whacks you over the nose until you learn to be good, the place from whence you’ll be sent home in a cone-of-shame inscribed “cray-cray” which you must wear for the rest of your life.
Good therapy is not like that! Therapy should be a safe place to talk through feelings and learn new strategies to cope and feel better.)
By the by, here’s a blog post about ways to access low-cost therapy in the US or Canada: http://captainawkward.com/2011/09/22/how-to-locat…
Thank you sooo much. I think I’ll try that.
“Once I got a piercing, thanks to the coincidence of payday with my directionless rage, and I’m drawn to the giddy high of big tattoos, the needles in my skin and the permanent marks they leave.”
Whole new perspective on my love of tattoos & recent plans to start a sleeve. :/
Heh! I’ve thought a lot about the relationship between self-harm and tattoos/piercings. I think I would have the tattoos anyway, but I can’t deny that I get kind of the same rush from both. That’s probably not true for everybody though.
I got a tragus piercing a few months ago because I got to a point where I would have cut myself if I hadn’t made a plan to go pay somebody to stab me with a needle instead.
have to add, to be fair: my mom IS worried. She just thinks that if she doesn't ask for help, there's no point in dragging her to therapy. But I think that cutting and drinking & smoking pot until you pass out is probably a cry for help. I dunno. Any advice?
The thing about cutting is I never felt better afterwards, just emptier; it's cathartic.
I think that's the thing for me, too – feeling empty is so much better than the alternative.
I'm glad you haven't cut in so long, though! That's a big accomplishment.
Thanks for the kind words 🙂 I'm trying to learn to be productive with all of this, since I can't seem to get rid of it.
Did you read The Jumble of Chronic Mental Illness that was posted a couple of days ago? I loved it.
I'm paraphrasing: If people are harming themselves, they are in trouble and should be helped. I do not care why. Their reasoning is no less valid because it comes from an issue with attention than from an issue with depression. If someone is hurting so badly from neglect in their life that they feel the need to injure themselves as a cry to the people around them, maybe someone should be listening.
I agree with this so much.
Haha, I did not work at Netflix but from what I've heard about Netflix the place I worked was really similar.
Oh jeeze, that's really hard. I don't necessarily have the best advice to offer on this – sometimes the best you can do is let someone know that you're there for them if they ever need anything. And they still might decide that they don't need/want anything from you. It's hard to force it. I hope that your sister is okay, though. That's a really terrible situation to be in, for all of you.
Heh! I've thought a lot about the relationship between self-harm and tattoos/piercings. I think I would have the tattoos anyway, but I can't deny that I get kind of the same rush from both. That's probably not true for everybody though.
Thank you for sharing this. It was beautifully and bravely written.
Thank you sooo much. I think I'll try that.
Thank you so much for your courage in sharing this. Self harm is seen as self destruction when it is the only way some people know of for surviving such intense emotional pain. If anyone knows someone who self-harms and wants to help, there is a two day course called Mental Health First Aid. There is MHFA England, MHFA Wales and MHFA Scotland. Ireland too. It is taught in over 22 countries because it’s brilliant. The course covers Depression, Suicide, Anxiety, Panic, PTSD, Phobias and psychosis, giving a 5-step approach to first aid for someone experiencing emotional or psychological distress. Check out the websites – it’s worth it.