Four-Month No-Self Harm Anniversary

TW: self-harm

This is a hard piece to write. It’s hard because I’m trying to make sure I’m not graphic so that people aren’t grossed out. I’m trying to make sure that I don’t write this in such a way that it might trigger other people’s self-harm. And I’m also trying to balance on the one hand talking about self-harm in a way that people can understand it and not seem like a crazy person—but also not to normalize it. Because it’s not normal and it’s definitely not good. It’s very dangerous, which is something that I wasn’t able to see when I was doing it.

It's been four months since the last time I self-harmed. I didn’t make a goal to stop self-harming. Not sure that would have helped. I just read a book that helped me to see that self-harming was a habit that would be sure to produce more self-harm and even though it “felt” like it was a solution to the problem, it was not a solution to anything. It is a self-perpetuating way of dealing with negative self-thoughts and suicidal ideation. It can feel like it is helping to manage those thoughts but it doesn’t really address the root causes.

Let me go back to explain that for me, suicidal thoughts were caused by the belief that I was a terrible person who did not deserve to remain alive because of all the mistakes I’d made and the harm I’d caused toward the people I love most in the world: my children. Suicidal thoughts started nearly twenty years ago when my daughter died and I wished more than anything to die, too, because living was too hard. Nonetheless, I stayed alive for my other children and after about ten years, the suicidal thoughts went away. Until I was blindsided by my now ex-husband’s demand for a divorce and my life felt like it was now over.

The divorce dragged on for three years as he insisted that I did not deserve alimony despite the fact that I’d stayed home for thirty years raising our children. During that time, I was scrambling to retrain for a new job that I don’t love but pays the bills, but I was also trying to figure out how to deal with helping my kids. I was devastated when my first attempt at a family vacation never got off the ground. And I just felt like I was never going to be enough to do all the things that it now felt like I was required to do. I hadn’t singed on to be a single parent like this, but it was what was necessary. I kept stretching myself too thin and then the suicidal thoughts returned.

The divorce was my fault. The problems with the kids were, clearly, my fault. My ex thought they were my fault, so they probably were. If my kids said anything even vaguely critical (and they weren’t always vague in their criticisms), I would end the evening wishing I was dead and wake up multiple times at night hearing swirling criticisms in my head of how horrible of a person I was and how much I should be dead. I tried therapy. I tried medication. Neither of them did much of anything to help the swirling thoughts and sense of worthlessness.

Enter self-harm. I had never self-harmed before this time period. Not as an angsty teen or even when my daughter died (unless you count training for an Ironman as self-harm, which OK, but not the same still). I tried to use my regular household knives and then decided to buy a special sharper knife that I kept in my bedroom to cut more easily and cleanly. Then I began to take my knife with me on outings that I thought might bring up suicidal thoughts. In my head, I called my knife a “safety knife.” I also brought bandaids and anti-biotic ointment. Because I am nothing if not safe and conscientious. Even in my self-harm.

I’m trying not to trigger self-harm in others, so I won’t tell you how it felt to put the knife to the skin of my arm and cut it. That wasn’t really the point of it anyway. The point was to mark myself in a way that I could look at later, to tell myself that I had punished myself sufficiently for my crimes (of being a bad person) and that meant I could keep on living. For now. I tried drawing a red line on my skin instead. Didn’t help. The pain and the harm of the self-harm were important elements. I had to be hurting myself and causing myself damage. I deserved this. It was justice and some part of my brain liked the idea that there was a weighing of the scales that evened things up for a bit.

[Not all self-harm is for the same reason. Some people self-harm to feel anything at all, or to feel alive.]

OK, that’s all I’m going to say about this habit. I just want to say that it isn’t normal to wish you were dead or to think you deserve to be punished by self-harm. But for nearly a full year, that thought “I wish I was dead” was so common that it was the first thing I heard my brain tell me every morning and I heard it hundreds of times every day almost without ceasing for months on end. I’d tried what my therapist and doctor recommended and it made things worse. Much worse. So I decided to try something that was definitely not recommended.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am not recommending self-harm. It was a terrible idea. It was dangerous.

But the problem was that I didn’t really have better resources and too many people I tried to talk to freaked out and tried to get me to promise not to hurt myself or made me feel shame about feeling suicidal. It wasn’t much more helpful for people to insist that of course I didn’t deserve to be dead or that of course things would get better if I just waited it out. Really the thing that was most helpful was the suggestion that perhaps the thoughts that I should be dead weren’t actually coming from me and that I should stop listening to them. This had not occurred to me before or at least I hadn’t been able to accept it as true.