Life Acts
Fake pain. That’s what some of us call it. This term is one that needs clarification though. It doesn’t mean that slicing a hole in my flesh with a brand new razor blade doesn’t hurt. In my experience, a sustained, deliberate act is much more painful than a quick, accidental burst. The feeling is real, but it is manufactured and, therefore, fake. The pain is exactly what I am looking for, so I draw it out. That’s why I mostly burn myself rather than cut. The urgent, searing sensation lasts longer.
I can understand why self-injury mystifies people. That’s part of the reason that it’s so easy to lie and say I know nothing about this obtuse survival mechanism. I’m not even sure that I fully comprehend it at times.
But the reductionist in me knows that, in my case, self-injury is about control. That’s where the term fake pain comes in. Some days, I come home from my eighth straight bad day at work, to have a bad time at home, with the prospect of having three assignments to complete by next Thursday for University. I stress and, eventually, my mind reacts to this stress overload by going numb. When I’m in this numb state, I lose my grip on all of the mundane things. I go to work and make the wrong judgement calls, I forget my girlfriend’s birthday and the Uni assignments hang unfinished above my head like cartoon anvils. I get so numb that I start to avoid busy intersections. It’s just too hard to focus on traffic and pedestrians and lights and not causing an accident all at once.
My mind may be numb, but my body isn’t. This is how self-injury works for me. I create pain, extra pain on top of the day-to-day stuff that I can’t feel any more. The pain I create is guttural. This pain, unlike the rest, is completely under my control. I initiate it. I sustain it. I finish it. The logic behind the process is simple. When I’m numb, my brain needs a wake-up call. There’s no greater alarm system in the human body than the pain response. After I’ve rung the bells for a while, my senses come back to me.
This metered dose has never failed to bring me back to myself and I’ve never found anything else that works quite as well.
We are more common than you think. In fact, if the statistic are correct, in a room of twenty-five people, chances are, there will be someone who does or did once regularly engage in self-injurious behaviours that are not culturally sanctioned (eg. body piercings, religious rites).
I refuse to acknowledge any attempt to classify what I, and others, do as a suicide attempt, parasuicide or indicative of a death wish. My method of administering the pain is precise. I have never required the smallest amount of outside medical attention for my wounds. There’s no death wish nested beneath the surface of my psyche. I am as far from suicide as anyone I’ve ever met. I view my self-injury, instead, as a life act. After my brain has shutdown and my senses have dulled, it brings me back to life again.
I similarly refuse to acknowledge any attempt to dismiss people who self-injure as ‘attention-seekers’. If we have to hurt ourselves in order to be heard, then something much worse than self-injury is happening. Dismissing us under these circumstances or, in the case of certain medical professionals, giving stitches without an anaesthetic, will not teach us a lesson. It will teach us to internalize the pain we are trying to deal with even more and, ultimately, result in further injuries.
I can usually pass the traces off as burns left from when I used to work frying hamburgers at McDonalds. It’s a line I heard a girl on a train use on her friends to explain the markings that we shared. I don’t know if she was telling the truth or if she, like me, had never worked in the fast food industry. Either way, her excuse is now my regular line.
People who self-injure are like that. We all have a thousand stories to explain the scars. I once moved my wardrobe and hit my arm on the sharp corner. Ten months later, I realised that I was using that exact same excuse on the same people. God only knows how an open wound lasted that long, grew and shrank rapidly, or, at one spectacular point, leapt from the inside of my forearm to just below my shoulder and back again. I’m forced to assume that the wound was, somehow, magic. I wasn’t caught out that time.
It’s easy to lie about cuts and scars. My lame excuses always seem to be accepted at face value. Maybe everyone who knows me silently questions my story but chooses to ignore the discrepancies. Either way, it serves my purpose. Being cursed with magical moving wounds gives me the time and space to talk about it with friends when I’m good and ready.
I lie because I’ve been disappointed in the past. Every person I have decided to trust has taken the information differently.
Sometimes, after hearing that I self-injure, people begin to tiptoe around me as if they think that one ill-spoken word or poorly timed gesture will send me into some suicidal or catatonic state. If I was that tender, surely someone ignorant of my acts would have pushed the wrong button by now. I’m not suddenly softer because I’ve told you.
Another common reaction is that people go to the opposite extreme and embark on a crusade to get me fixed. It’s unnecessary. I am learning to deal with life in healthier ways from people who are much, much more qualified than they are. Anyway, just because I self-injure, it doesn’t mean that I’m a charity case.
The people I value the most are the ones who I tell and react by acknowledging the fact that I have added one more dimension of trust into the friendship and move on. My relationship with them doesn’t change.
I sporadically go through periods of researching self-injury. During one of these periods, I came across a support group on the Internet for people who self-injure. Linked to this group is a chat-room, which I now visit almost daily.
In the room, I found people who understood it all from first-hand experience. I found people who knew the sense of empowerment that comes from knowing your wounds are self-inflicted and how hard it is to wear long-sleeves on every single forty-degree day.
The people in there are much more varied than I expected. In somewhat of a naïve state, I thought that everyone who self-injures does it for the same reasons that I do, but the multitude of variations among us, as people and as self-injurers, is astounding. What is perhaps more interesting is how, despite these differences between us, we all associate on the same level. We talk outside of race, age or position in society because we all share something of a stigma. The mood is one of respect. No-one’s experience is any more or less valid than anyone else’s.
The group has also created some of its own words to help us interact with one another. The words, ‘Urgy’, and, ‘Triggery’, are often tacked on to someone’s screen name to dictate their current mental state. Occasionally, the letters, ‘SU’, are added to the end of a screen name, to indicate that the person is currently experiencing suicidal emotions. Sometimes, it’s hard to remember that, while I never associate self-injury and suicide, others do.
I can talk of the fellowship I feel for anyone who causes their own pain because I can, for the most part understand how it feels, but I would be lying if I claimed that there was exact correspondance amongst us. My words aren’t the words of everyone in this minority. They are just one perspective on the phenomena.
So if one of us tells you that we self-injure, the best thing you can do for us is refrain from making assumptions. It’s a basic, look-before-you-leap approach. If you want to know something about a person’s self-injury just ask. Chances are that, if we have gone to the effort of telling you, we will be more than happy to answer your questions. It’s better that you know why we do what we do than for us to leave you to draw your own conclusions.
24.10.04 - I wrote this nearly two years ago, at the time where I was self-injuring the most that I had in all of my life. Currently, I haven't self-injured in nine months, and am not yet feeling the urge to do so. This is a landmark time for me.
I definitely cannot say that I am fixed or cured, but I am progressively getting better. I like to think that I no longer need the crutch of self-injury. If my scars fade a little bit more, I might be able to wear short sleeves this summer.