I started cutting because at a certain point in my life I ran afoul of a certain unique set of circumstances for neither experience nor my own emotional constitution had equipped me. I can't say what precise conjunction of factors led me to choose self mutilation as my recourse, nor can I say how my life might have been different had one of these factors been otherwise. All that I can say is that my skin itself, seemed to cry out for an absolution in blood.
I kept cutting because it worked. When I cut, I felt better for a while. When I cut, my life no longer overwhelmed me. I felt too keenly the thread of chaos. Of how things get away from you in a thousand different ways. Bodies expand, grades plummet, pets die, paint peels, ice caps melt, genocide erupts. Entropy keeps eating away at the ramparts, and I cut as an affirmation of hope saying - I have drawn a line, and I am on this side of it.
There=s no explaining, by reason of logic, any more than you can measure grief with a mathematical equation, or formulate memory in a test tube. Sometimes the mind just has ideas of its own. I could look back over the evidence of more than ten years, marked in dozens of scars at a time. Some pale, some dark. Some ribbed by the patchwork of tissue that reconnected the severed fabric of my being. Some almost too faint to announce themselves - except as the most infinitesimal of breaks in the crosshatched pattern of my skin. How many cuts can I count? How many can I place in time or context? I have to admit that I can't remember the occasion of all of them all, their catalysts, whether epic or mundane, completely obscured by time. So many moments of unendurable pain, now utterly forgot. I started to think, maybe I don't need this anymore. Maybe I never did.
I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting; that's the inelegant truth. No matter how compelling the urge, the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the flood tide of emotion that drove me to that brink, but I had the power to decide whether or not to step over.
Stopping, however, was not the same thing as ending the desire. Even now I sometimes ache with a fierce, organic need for cuttings seductive, minimalist simplicity. I except that I will always be the kind of person who is too much aware of the boundlessness of chaos; it's like having an unfortunate sixth sense, alive to the teeming, invisible undercurrents of anarchy streaming past us at every moment. I don't say that it makes me stronger, or more interesting, or gives me character; its just a part of my fabric of self. Most days it stills makes me yearn at least once, and on the bad days, constantly, for a leave of absence from my own life any way I can get it. I won=t lie and say that I have yet to give in. The visual difference between old and new is obvious, bringing with it bittersweet inquiries as well as jaded and almost apathetic glances of knowing from those I've known long.
But you get older, and you see that you have choices, or at least you are more aware of them, and you see that you're only going to have this one life. And it's up to you whether you want to seize hold of it and make it yours, or leave it forever waiting in unclaimed baggage. If I could have understood the point, purpose, or impact that would have manifested itself from the impulsive act of picking up a deleterious methodic coping mechanism - maybe it would have saved me a significant amount of grief. Maybe, on the other hand, you just have to make your journey, and bear its scars. I have drawn a new line, but this time, I seem to be standing on top of it.
Tags: Reflective
