kjpepper | Hurt

i hurt myself today
to see if I still feel
i focus on the pain
the only thing that's real
the needle tears a hole
the old familiar sting
try to kill it all away
but i remember everything...

I have a feeling this is going to get quoted into the ground today but nevertheless, I include it here. Hey, if something works, go with it.

So apparently today is Self-Injury Awareness Day. I didn't know this until I read a post from

blueraccoon earlier this morning, and as I hurried into Seelye Hall ten minutes late for class there was a tiny postal box full of lurid orange ribbons and a note in the entryway.

Generally my reaction to this sort of thing is a fairly flip "Oh boy! Another awareness day/week/month! Bet Smith's having a vigil/dinner/panel/dinging/moment of silence/moment of zen/chalking/rave/orgy/ani difranco concert/bake sale about it somewhere, so where and when?" (the ghosts of smithies past best be rolling.) That's just me whistling in the dark, though. Every so often one of these things resonates. This one did.

I am a cutter, have been for as long as I remember. At some early age I discovered that sometimes when something's wrong and either no one will listen to you or you don't feel like you can tell anyone about shit brewing in your spirit, it helped to translate it into actual physical pain that later heals, rather than leaving it as this intangible, untouchable, unhealable pain that doesn't. I don't have scars from it (with two exceptions), I was always careful to never leave any, instead choosing implements that would leave small marks that faded away, things like needles, pins, mechanical pencil tips, the sharp folds of pieces of notebook paper. My favorite thing was the pointy end of my math compass. They would leave thin red painful scratches when I was done that itched like hell while they healed, but they were easily hidden by sleeves or pants, didn't bleed, and disappeared in four days or less.

Usually I just did lines, maybe four or five at a time. I remember the one time I used a ruler to get several lines on my upper arm perfectly parallel and straight. Sometimes I got whimsical, and the lines became swirls and spirals, or full games of tictactoe. Sometimes I scraped the names of the people hurting me into my skin over and over and over again. You know, even when you go to the trouble of threading a sewing needle into a .7 mechanical pencil, it's a bitch to write in cursive on yourself. Those of you that have seen the disaster that is my thin, spidery ~~chickenscratch~~ handwriting could probably get some idea of how much of a pain in the butt it was to get something to show up right. But printing, perversely enough, felt like a cop-out.

Pain vented, I went on, reminded of what I'd done by fabric gently scraping across the raw bits. And they were gone four days later.

I got through growing up, I went to high school then college, found other fabulous ways of coping (yes, that's saracasm), and cut less often. The last few times that I remember though were bad. This is probably why I haven't gone back to it. When you get older, you get less careful about the harm you do, the scars you leave. Then again when you get older, shit hurts more. I messed up twice, left scars behind, and in fairly visible places that I then had to explain or lie to people about. Actually, both of them are on my right hand (I'm left handed, can't you tell?): a small one jut beneath the heel of my hand, the others scrawled across the back. I forget why at some point in junior year of high school I took it into my head to keep digging at my wrist with my compass, find out how far down I could go. The answer was pretty deep. That one bled like a sonofabitch, for something that was only an eighth of an inch long. I forget what story I fed my parents for that one... the last time I cut myself lacked the premeditation and control of any of the others, but is rather telling considering over the past few years I've been losing the ability to contain intense shit going down. This was two years ago, where after some comparatively trivial in-house drama I grabbed one of the forks I had been washing at the time (gotta love dishes) and quite viciously sliced the back of my hand open several times. That sucked, and took a couple of months to heal up completely... everyone seemed to buy the falling on ice story I concocted at the time. Now y'alls know why I have a bunch of thin parallel scars on my hand.

It's kinda interesting how this came up today, just as I'm in the middle of one of the most stressful periods in my life. I'm the first to admit that I haven't been coping with most of it in any way that's effective. I still crave pain sometimes at peaks in my stress-fu, but I noticed today that I've managed to redirect the cutting into other things - gymbunnying, a little bit of bdsm, excessive livejournaling (ha ha). I can't say that any of it is any more constructive in helping me cope with my actual issues head on, but at least I don't have to wear long sleeves while doing so anymore.

I did wind up taking an orange ribbon. It's pinned to my backpack, the traditional place of honor for pride/awareness ribbons and militant ideology buttons. But its there today, for me, and for everybody else out there. And y'alls better appreciate it too - you would not believe how much that ribbon clashes with my purple backpack. Yargh! :)

PS I hate web updating LJ. Luckily I had the foresight to copy and paste this entry into word before I tried to post it, as the browser promptly ate the entry. I don’t think I would have been able to write this again.