Just Me Being Me: A Dissection of Self-Harm
Why would anyone ever do this to themselves? It serves no purpose other than to remind you of your terrible decision-making capabilities.
Just Me Being Me is literally just me being me, living my life outside my comfort zone when it happens as it happens. Since I’m a dedicated introvert, this doesn’t happen much, which makes it doubly interesting when it does. Full disclosure: This is something I wrote on May 10, 2018. I’ve been feeling sick since Friday last week and haven’t felt like working on the dozens of drafts I have on Substack—sorry! This will have to do. For those who care—these days, I keep my nails short and blunt, and I meditate daily to control my temper. Please don’t worry about me!
I didn’t mean to hurt myself today, but I did. My arms and hands ache, and a single band-aid on my wrist pulls on my skin uncomfortably as I type. Why would anyone ever do this to themselves? It serves no purpose other than to remind you of your terrible decision-making capabilities.
Let’s backtrack. How did I hurt myself?
I punched a wooden wall multiple times until I felt the joints in my fingers start to hurt. I slammed my palms down repeatedly on a wooden table, adding wrist strain as an accent to the dull throb I still feel.
What’s the band-aid for? I’m glad you didn’t ask, but I’ll digress anyway. It’s funny. I started with the punching and slamming because I didn’t want to resort to my go-to self-harm tactic: scratching.
I didn’t even know scratching could be considered self-harm…
until I read some media influencer-slash-celebrity talking about going through the same thing. Why would scratching be self-harm if it didn’t bruise, didn’t bleed?
Well, the joke is on me—as unfunny as it is—because guess what? Earlier today, I could not stop myself from scratching, and for the first time, I drew blood and sustained bruises. Hence, the band-aid. There is no denying this now, I suppose.
Let’s backtrack even more. Why did I hurt myself?
It’s really not important, but just so no one thinks I’m crazy and I just hurt myself for fun, I will say that I was in the middle of a verbal fight with someone.
I don’t fight right. I never have—or at least, I think I never have. Something about my upbringing and how I navigated my teenage years’ social waters turned me into this mess. I always feel like I have to either bottle everything up and take everyone’s shit or explode into a cacophony of emotions because I can’t keep them tamped down anymore.
As you can probably guess, neither option really works.
Earlier, it was a combination of the two that brought about this damning evidence of my capacity for self-harm. I spoke up because someone yelled at me and then shut down when they shut down. Only when I shut down, I also locked myself in a room and started screaming and throwing shoes against a wall, like a child. To me, that was preferable to self-harm.
My feelings were spilling over, and I didn’t know where to put them, and obviously, no one wanted to listen.
So I screamed and shouted—and considered it progress. In the past, I just scratched myself, teared up, blamed everything on my inability to do anything right, and hated myself for being so weak.
When did I bruise myself? When did I draw blood? Obviously, I was being very loud, and the person I was fighting with knocked on the door to check on me. This led to me talking about how I felt when they remained silent after I opened the door.
Specifics no longer matter, but this led to a short discussion that escalated into another screaming match. I remember them telling me that they knocked on the door to make sure I wasn’t hurting myself. I explained that I wasn’t, and for some reason, the way I said it set off another bout of yelling.
This is when I truly shut down.
Are you familiar with that feeling you get when you’re all cried out, but your body can’t stop crying?
When your eyes hurt because it feels like there are no more tears left to squeeze out. When your lungs hurt because your throat and nasal passages are blocked with snot and you end up mouth breathing until you hyperventilate. When your head hurts because you’re dehydrated. When your heart hurts because no one gets you.
When it happens to me, I start repeating a phrase to focus on so I stop crying. This time, the phrase was: “Calm down.” Again, this part feels like progress. Let me run through some previous phrases I’ve used in the past ten years alone:
“Crying is for babies.”
“It’s all your fault.”
“Don’t be a little bitch.”
“Just suck it up.”
“Stop it, you’re ruining everything.”
“Calm down,” over and over, under my breath, did feel like I was doing a little bit better. Only I didn’t realize I was also scratching myself. If I did, I would have had the presence of mind to scratch myself where I could easily hide the scars under my clothes.
By the time I had calmed down, I had a six-inch paper cut-like gash along my left forearm and a deeper cut on my right wrist. I had used my already hurting fingers to scratch myself all over with such force that I felt bruising. Each word I type out now hurts because of this.
So why type at all? Because I need to document this.
I need to have an account of the day I hurt myself for real. Because months down the line, if I don’t get better, I’ll know that it started today.
I’ll know that when it started, I thought it was wrong. I thought I needed to do better, be better. I needed to heal.
So that’s what I’m doing. I hope.
My arms and hands feel like they’re on fire, fueled by pain and embarrassment. Maybe that’s enough for me never to do this again—but I doubt it.
Photo by Claudia Love on Unsplash
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