I thought about cutting Sunday night.
I was laying in bed alone Sunday night around midnight and I was thinking about cutting. I was merely curious. Obviously, I didn’t do it. I was just curious. I was curious if it would have still felt the same. If my shaking hands would have been stilled. If my pounding heart would have slowed. Would I have felt like I could take a deep breathe? Even for just one fleeting moment. Or was that all things I left in the past.
I thought about cutting Sunday night. It’s not the first time I’ve thought about it over the last few years. It doesn’t consume my thoughts like it used to. But there are moments that I have a few weak minutes. Or like Sunday, a few hours of weak moments. It’s been 3 years, 8 months and 27 days since the last time I cut, or played with my eating disorder. Some days it feels like a lifetime ago. Some days I wake up and it feels like yesterday. Some mornings I have such vivid dreams I wake up in a cold sweat and have to run to the bathroom and check my arms.
I feel like people that are (because once a cutter, always a cutter) self harmers should get chips like in AA. I think I’d carry that chip around with me. To feel accomplished. To maybe have recognition. To remind myself not matter how hard the days have been, I haven’t slipped. To have a tangible object to illustrate my strength. But there isn’t a support group offered for self harm. There isn’t a church on every corner that will have receptions to congratulate 1 month clean.
The thing is, even in 2018, people still don’t know how to react to self harm. I can’t openly talk about how I’m feeling. I mean, if I really wanted to, I could confide that the dark thoughts in my head still haunt me. That I have demons that scream at me and it’s getting harder to silence them. But I can’t tell anyone I thought about cutting. Even when I didn’t do it and never intended to actually do it again. I can’t explain i was just curious.
I think I am so intrigued with the thought again because of how my recovery was shaped. I often think that my recovery started the day I was in the emergency room and I was 1013’d. When I was stripped of my humanity and forced to believe there was something genuinely wrong with me. When I FINALLY got out of inpatient and graduated from my intensive outpatient program, I was so broken and angry and drugged. Part of me wanted to cut just to show everyone I could. But I didn’t. My wonderful therapist that I had been seeing for months before my hospital stent reminded my recovery started much earlier than on New Years Eve. It started the day I talked in therapy- after multiple sessions of silence. I was starting to dig into the roots of my feelings. I was learning that the self destructive things weren’t helping me anymore. The hospital and IOP and all the people involved did the single worst thing they could have done at the time. They took away my will. My progress. My coping skills. My hope. My therapist reminded me of how far I’d already come and that no one could take away my recovery unless I allowed them.
It has been the longest journey of my life, but I haven’t once faltered. Self harm and depression and anxiety are a slippery slope. I am afraid it always will be. I have grown an immeasurable amount since 2014 and I am stronger than I ever thought I could be. Even though sometimes I think about cutting, it is from a totally different mindset. I want to see if it is the same release as it used to be. I want to be the one to make the decision for myself to whisper goodbye to the old me. I will forever wonder many questions about cutting that I believe would give me closure and a peace, but those things were taken away from me. Most days, I am fine with this, but nights like Sunday I lay in bed thinking of them.
I’m not the only one going through things. My family isn’t the first with a devastating caner diagnosis. I’ve been through enough therapy and read enough books to know I’m not the only one struggling. I’m not the only girl that has ever have anxiety or depression or had an eating disorder or was a cutter. I know I’m not the only one, but why do I feel so alone? I have a fake twitter name so I can express how I am feeling without worrying about being “judged.” I don’t link or tell anyone about my blog because I don’t want people walking on egg shells around me. I don’t tell my family or my husband because how do I explain something I can’t even explain myself?
“I’m not fine as in fine, but fine as in you don’t have to worry about me.”
I thought about cutting Sunday, just because I was curious. If you are reading this and actually know me (sneaky sneaky)- DO NOT FRET! I know I will never cut again, for many reasons:
1). Once you start the shit, it’s hard as hell to stop. So I just won’t do it.
2). I would never want to worry or disappoint my family again. I can’t imagine the hell I put them through. For that, I will always be sorry.
3). I would never risk getting sent back to ANY hospital. It is just not worth it. Trust me.
4). I have a tattoo surrounding my ‘sobriety” date. And getting a tattoo removed would suck.
5). I’m stronger than I was. I’m still discovering myself without being labeled a self harmer and everything that entails. I know my triggers and warning signs. I ask for help when I need it.
I thought about cutting Sunday, just because I was curious.
xoxo,
jojo
Jorie Anna Live 