Since I started working the overnight shift nearly two years ago, I have hated 3AM. It’s not necessarily the time of night I start to get tired (that’s 4am) or when I begin to feel sick (that’s 5). It’s that if you work a 10 to 8 shift like I do, it’s the halfway mark. You look at the clock and think, “Wow, 3am! I’ve been here forever” and you realize that you have another 5 hours to go.
That’s not even what I meant for this post to be about. It’s Sunday, now that it’s past midnight, and that means that it’s been two weeks since I last cut myself. The marks are almost gone. Hardly noticeable, actually, and they won’t leave scars. I guess this is the first of my secrets to show up in this online journal- I’m a cutter. I don’t think I’ve ever flat-out said that before.
It started when I was 13, and I was in the seventh grade. Of course, teenagers rarely come up with the idea to cut themselves of their own accord. I had gotten the idea from another client at the crisis unit that I had recently stayed at. More about that later. I had a massive fight with my mother about something that I can’t even remember. Whenever I had a fight with mama, though, it turned into a fight with my dad as well. He couldn’t stand it if I lost control, and things with him almost always turned physical. More about that later, as well.
So I screamed, cried, ran to my room, and slammed the door. I waited for my dad to calm down a little. I came back out into the kitchen, and pulled a glass out of the cupboard, pretending that I needed some water. Except, I dropped the glass. On purpose. Then I cleaned up the mess, save for the three fingernail-sized pieces of glass that I tucked up my sleeve when no one was looking. Until I started writing this, I had forgotten that the first time I cut myself was thoroughly premeditated.
I remember taking them to my room and putting them in a little jewelry box under the bed. I knew that my mama would come in to kiss me goodnight, and to apologize for the way my dad had acted. After she did that, and I was sure my parents were asleep, I took out the glass and started in on my wrists. Cutting my wrists right then was not a suicide attempt, or even a coping skill. It was a guilt trip, and an attention seeking behavior. I thought that showing my parents that I would hurt myself might manipulate my father into keeping his hands off me.
Well, it backfired. I mean, of course it did. I was 13, mentally unstable, and trying to control my parents! I didn’t show them the next morning because I really wanted to go to the basketball away-from-home game with the band that day, and in the light of day I knew that showing them would probably land me in the emergency room rather than on the schoolbus. I wore long sleeves, and sat on the bus with my boyfriend at the time. He wanted to hold hands, and he discovered the cuts because I flinched when he touched me. They were painful cuts. He was pretty upset, but relatively understanding. He encouraged me to hide it from my parents, and to never do it again. He didn’t want me to be back in the hospital or in the crisis unit again.
As far as I know, my parents never found out about those cuts. My mama found the glass in my room, though, and I think she suspected it. I may never find out how much that woman actually knows about me! Moving on.
So, that was my first experience with cutting. I didn’t do it again for maybe 6 months or so. After a particularly bad fight with my parents one night, I tried it again. This time it was entirely different. It was a spontaneous decision that seemed to appear in my brain out of nowhere specific. I was having one of those episodes where I was in such a complete state of crisis that I couldn’t seem to do anything but scream, cry, cough, choke, so on. I remember going into the bathroom and picking up my razor. It’s kind of interesting that I can see it all in my memory, but it’s blurry, because my vision was blurred from crying. This is gory, but I just slashed up my leg with it. Immediately, the crying stopped. I could breathe without gasping for air. Even my headache started to fade. It was that moment exactly that I discovered cutting as a coping skill, and the addiction began.
Those are the incidents that stand out in my mind from when I was young. I continued cutting myself through my teenage years, off and on. I would go through times where I’d do it every week, or every few days, and at other times I would go months or nearly a year before doing it again. To be honest, it just didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I didn’t even try to break the habit or make it stop. I only did it as a last resort, when I couldn’t seem to find any other way to calm down. I did smarten up about how I was doing it, though. I have some very faint scars on my wrists from the first time, and a noticable scar on my right leg from the first time I used a razor. I discovered after that, though, that if you take the blades out of the razor, they create very thin cuts that are just painful enough for the desired effect. They bleed, sure, but the scars fade to nothing in just a few weeks. I never wanted to leave a mark.
Getting out of my parent’s house helped a lot. I moved in with my sister at 17. Lots of traveling and studying at home allowed me to graduate without changing schools. Between the ages of 16 and 19, I taught dance at a local studio. I think that having a key to a dance studio for my use anytime also helped. My dad was no longer hurting me, so I didn’t have to worry about that. The worst of my troubles involved boys, and that I could dance off instead of cutting myself over. I went years. I stopped cutting soon after turning 17.
I’m sort of trying to stay on the same subject. I want to get my whole life out on “paper”, to help me process, but one thing at a time! So, fast forward. There’s a whole lot of life between 17 and 20, but 20 is when the issue with cutting came back. I got involved with a man 10 years older than myself. I can’t even begin to explain everything today, but the story of our relationship can be another topic for another time. For now, just know that I decided he was my soulmate in two weeks, moved in with him after dating three months, and married him a year and a half after that. He makes me crazy. He’s the only one who can be both so loving, and so cruel, that I find myself in a state of crisis not unlike the ones I faced nearly a decade ago.
What’s worse is I know cutting myself makes him totally crazy. It makes the situation so much more difficult because he doesn’t understand that I do it to calm down, to regroup, to cope, or whatever. He strongly believes that it is a guilt trip, a way to get his attention, and a sign of weakness. At first I would tell him, and ask him to help me. I wanted him to try and understand, or at least accept what I was doing and help me find an alternative. I’m not against working on new coping mechanisms, I just can’t do it while he’s screaming at me.
In the last few months, this cutting thing has gotten completely out of control. It certainly feels like an addiction, and it’s back hardcore. I find myself skipping over the things that usually help. I don’t take a bath, or sit in my rocking chair. I never go for a walk or call a friend. Instead I go straight to cutting myself, and it serves as enough distraction for grounding and focusing. Then I bandage the cuts, hide them from my husband, and sleep it off.
I keep gauze and medical tape because I really feel like I’ll need it. I’ve gotten more sophisticated with the tools, also. I use razor blades similar to the blades one might use in a scraper, as well as a couple that belong in a sewing kit. I hide them in my lingerie drawer, and others in the drawer where I keep my headbands. The husband never looks those places, as far as I know.
The more I write, the more insane all of this seems. I should stop. It’s been two weeks, and I could probably go longer still. I worry about losing my job, should this be discovered. I’m a social worker, and no- it’s not ironic. Social workers are all in this field for a reason. Many of us have a history of trauma. Right now, I’m working to overcome my own trauma, one long night of processing at a time.
