I’ve been seeing posts around, here and there, online and in real life. They’re becoming more and more frequent, as the conversation around mental health has opened up and more and more people have been drawn into the conversation. Everyone these days knows about depression, everybody knows about anxiety. Everybody knows what self-harm is.
Self-harm. Must have been ’01 when I first start cutting myself. I was in year 8, it was the end of a rough academic year emotionally, and my anxiety (which I was incapable of recognising ’til several years later) was sky high. I had depression, I had Asperger’s but nobody knew so I had no support or explanation. I thought I was fat but tried to pretend I didn’t care, and I couldn’t cut myself some slack when my body’s performances weren’t up to scratch. I had end of year exams in which I had to excel but I ‘wasn’t allowed’ to work for them (no idea where that part came from. Had that since year 5 when I couldn’t use paper provided to answer maths problems and lost marks as a result, seem to remember I got a bollocking). So yeah, I was a stressed and distressed 12 year old kid who started cutting themselves.
And it carried on, and the whole eating disorder thing was rolling happy, and I wound up in FF#1 in 2005, and I had sharps taken from me and I gained 14kg in 6 weeks, and I burned the backs of my wrists with my 220-deg. hair straighteners because I HAD to hurt myself because I couldn’t COPE, and it was the best option available. By 2009 I was being stitched up weekly, I was self-poisoning with aspirin, drinking too much, and into hospital I went. And when I came out, the damage being done just escalated further and further along with the eating disorder.
My body is a wreck. The whole EDS thing too, I keloid scar. My right outside forearm has had a bit of a hacking and has been most obviously affected by burning in that there’s very obvious ‘banding’ nearer my elbow from scar tissue constriction, and the inside again has silvery burn scars. Right upper arm has a couple of short keloids but nothing major. I have a scar along my cheekbone, and a few on my chest which are visible but not comparatively noteworthy. I think I’ve a couple around my hipbones and some on my upper thighs, more nearer ankles and feet but who really looks there?
My left arm is a tornado of scars. The back of my hand is too scarred to show the veins (despite my other hand being transparent) from all the cigarette burns. The outside is a total mesh of scars, stitched over and over and over, cuts that have gone the full way around. There’s a huge vertical keloid ploughing down from elbow to wrist, and it’s that one people tend to ask about. There’s scar tissue continuing up the upper arm; there have been many burns over the inside of the forearm as well as a couple of other more random cuts, and moving my hand shows the inelasticity of the scarred skin.
I’m trying to write this as objectively as possible. I’ve not written this with any emotion, and that’s my point.
These posts I’ve been seeing, they’re all about how to cover/hide the scars from self-harm. I can’t help but feel somewhat perplexed about this. I feel like I’m expected to be ashamed of my scars, and want to cover them or hide them in any way I can. I say screw that shit. They’re my arms, they’ve been attached to my body for 15 years since I started chopping at them despite my very best efforts and I see them thousands of times a day – they are what they are, and they’re my arms.
Grace's Musings 