Gaining Control

The blood drips down my arm, leaving spots of shame on the bottom of the sink. The razor is dull. I have to push hard, but I feel nothing but a distant burning sensation in my arm as my thin, sensitive skin peels away. The blood keeps coming, running over my arm and in to the sink, landing in droplets, like the tears I can’t cry.

The only thing I feel is irritation at the mess I am going to have to clean up. I hate myself for bleeding. I hate myself for not cutting deeper.

It takes me a few tries to draw a third line. My hands are shaking, and I can’t keep them still. But, when I do, it doesn’t hurt.

Attempting to wash the blood away, I turn on the faucet, and run my arm under the hot water. Now it hurts, and I want to draw a fourth line.

“You have to stop!” I say, dimly aware that I am screaming at no one but my reflection and an empty house, and also that neither of them are listening. “I am not afraid! This doesn’t even hurt! I’m bleeding and I’m not afraid and it doesn’t hurt and I’m not sorry…”

I keep talking to the emptiness, trying to blot out the silence. I want nothing more than to draw that fourth line, deep this time. Then, I won’t hate myself for being weak.

But I can’t, because now the house isn’t empty; there are voices in the garage and doors closing and people are coming. I wish they would go away, and I wish that I was wishing for a better feeling, not for that fourth burning line. But I don’t have time to make my wish come true, nor do I have time to try to search for that better feeling, because I’ve made a mess and I have only a few minutes to clean it up and hide my crazy.

I pull the sleeve of my best friend’s sweatshirt over my bleeding skin, praying that I won’t bleed through the fabric. It still smells like her. She would be devastated to know. I think briefly about the first time I cut myself, just a small line on my thigh, only a week earlier. She cried and begged me to promise her I wouldn’t do it again. She said she knew how hard it was to stop, and I remembered how bad it had been for her. But I couldn’t promise then, and I can’t promise now, because I never make promises I know I can’t keep.

I heave a few panicked breaths, trying to relax, but failing. They’re going to find out. The whole bathroom will be drenched in blood. I can picture it now: the shaggy rug will be stiff and heavy with clumps of dried blood. The sink will be slick with it. The blood will keep coming, pouring out of my stomach, my hips, my neck… They will see me, a shell of who I used to be, the girl I couldn’t stand, lying there on the floor. They will slip on the tile. I will die. And they will blame themselves.

I don’t really want to die. But also, I don’t really want to live. But I won’t die today because I’m still being careful; I know where my veins are, and I avoid them.

My insides are screaming in pain, and I can feel my brain shutting down. I have finally snapped… But I’m still not ready to die. I havn’t gone totally insane just yet. I’m still sane enough to go downstairs on shaky legs, and to notice, with relief that the blood hasn’t soaked through yet, and probably won’t.

I didn’t split myself open, but I can’t stop my heart from racing. I try to tell myself that it’s over, that my demons went to sleep, but they’ve rooted themselves so deeply inside of me now that I can hear their dreams. I am living two lives at once. In one, I am walking in to my dad’s arms and he is holding me tightly, saying how glad he is to see me, how he’s had a bad day and is so happy to be home. There is a lump in my throat and I say I’m stressed out, too, and he wants to talk about it. But I keep picturing myself dead on the bathroom floor, and I can’t get any words past the lump in my throat.

My senses are dimmed because in my other life, I am still screaming, running back and forth, hitting the walls, trying to break through them, but I can’t. In my other life, I am clawing at my face, yanking out my hair, tearing off my clothes. And I feel nothing but an overwhelming sense of desperation, knowing that I will never be able to escape.

In my real life, my kitchen is warm with the presence of my dad and my brother, and the heat of their love scorches the lines on my arm. If I stay here, I’ll cry or speak or move the wrong way, and then everything will fall to ruin. I am their perfect, God-loving daughter who’s going to be very successful in everything she does, not the crazy girl who screams and cuts her own skin. I’m supposed to want to live a quiet, fulfilling, heterosexual life, like everyone else in my family.

“I’ve got myself in quite the situation,” I say, forcing myself to laugh cheerfully. “I’ve pretty much gotta write an entire paper tonight, so I’d better get started. Well, I mean, I did write it, like five times, it’s just that it never seems to work out. I finally decided I needed to write about something else, you know, it’s really hard to put things in to words sometimes. So I thought I could try to work with a different tone…”

I keep going, gathering momentum until I’m speaking so quickly I can hardly understand myself. My dad is silent, and my brother slowly leaves the room. I spoke. And if I keep going, they will know. I will tell my dad everything, and I’m not ready to do that, and I know he’s not ready to hear it. But I still can’t stop. I start talking about old memories and random things that happened at school and everything that makes no sense, and none of my thoughts are connecting.

“Slow down,” my dad says, putting his arm around my shoulder. “You’re scaring me.”

He saved me, and he saved himself from my waterfall of truths. I want to sink in to his warmth, but I don’t. Instead, I pull away, let out a long breath and turn to go, leaving him hanging. I don’t feel guilty right now. I just run upstairs as fast as I can and close my door, sit down at my desk and wake up my computer.

Pages and pages of words, sentences and paragraphs are opened up on the screen in front of me, but none of it makes sense. It is all a blur of logic and organization. But I speak chaos so skillfully that I could unravel worlds and worlds of perfect harmony in seconds, and that’s what I do to all the work I’ve done in the past week. With nothing but my fingers and the keys to cut and paste, I tear four pages of writing, piece by piece, out of one document and place them in another—scraps. And now I am left sitting in front of an empty screen, shaking hands clasped together in a prayer that consists of silence. God whispers to me about the list of positive self-talk sayings on my wall, and in a desperate search for inspiration, I go to them.

I choose to be present in everything that I do. I think thoughts that serve me well. I search for a better feeling.

It’s all BS. Therapy speak. I remember when I wrote them all out, and hung them on the wall by my closet, the cream-colored paper looking ridiculous against my purple wall, but I didn’t care because I was excited then, ready to search for that better feeling and be present in all that I do. I don’t feel excited now. I have no idea how to search for that better feeling, so, indulging myself, I begin to type. I type the language of darkness and chaos. And it makes sense, but I still wipe out a good two pages, adding them to my evergrowing document of scraps before I give in to my true thoughts and start being honest with myself, and with the keyboard.

The honesty is not pretty, and I feel sick to my stomach, and my head starts pounding. I long to go back in to the bathroom, but instead, I torture myself with the pain of being vulnerable when all I want is to clamp my shell closed. I am completely enveloped in my work, surprising myself with my morbidity, and scaring myself when I laugh at things I write that are particularly terrifying. I know none of this could ever be turned in as a school assignment, but I have to perge my system of the darkness and the pain before I can go on. But as I keep typing, and time keeps passing, I begin to fear that I’ll never go on, that I’ll be frozen in front of this computer forever.

It’s 2 A.M. before I finally slow down, and eventually run out of steam altogether. I still have nothing to turn in, but I’m too tired to continue.

I am exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I run my fingers over the scabs on my arm, pressing harder than I should, digging my nails in to my flesh, still amazed that they don’t hurt, not even when I break one open. But now I’m bleeding again, and I rush to the bathroom. I count 1, 2, 3 lines… 4, five. I cut myself five times, but I only remember three of them. A shiver runs down my spine, and my stomach twists in knots. I know that this isn’t normal. I know that there were times, about fifteen years worth, that I didn’t cut myself to deal with my pain, but I can’t remember what those times were like.

I go back to bed, wrap myself in all my blankets, and fall asleep praying that I’ll wake up with a deadly disease that leaves me bedridden for weeks on end. But God doesn’t listen, because I wake up with nothing more than a stomach ache and a sadness that makes all my limbs heavy and my eyes watery. I have no good reason to skip school, and I don’t really want to stay home and wallow.

Somehow I manage to put on clothes, get myself on the bus, and walk in to the school, but everything is a blur of sounds and movements of my mouth… I am saying things, all the right things, but I have no idea what they are. The next thing I know, I’m in the counceling office. I have no idea why I came here, but I keep thinking how I’ve been here way too much lately.

I sit down in one of the chairs to wait, and pray that Mrs. Chambers, the school social worker who I’ve established a pretty good relationship with, is in the building, but I’m pretty sure she’s not. I don’t know what I’m going to talk to her about, or what I’m going to do if she’s not there, but I’m still not thinking clearly.

The counceling office is completely empty, the only sound coming from the ticking of the clock on the wall, and I roll up my sleeve and trace the scabs on my arm. What on earth was I thinking?

“Can I help you?”

I make my way up to the desk and place my hands on top of it, pick my chin up and set my jaw, serious and confident, like I always am when I ask for Mrs. Chambers. I don’t know why I feel that I need to look all composed, because it’s clear by my request that I’m not, but I do. It’s just one of those things that makes me feel more comfortable in that office of judgement and awkwardness.

“She’s not here right now. Do you need someone to talk to?”

“No, can I just sit here for a minute?”

I try to smile, but my face betrays me and crumples.

“Aww, sweetie, do you need someone to talk to?”

The lady is around the desk and hugging me in three seconds, and I can’t decide whether to be honest and say yeah, I do, or punch her for trying to hug me without my permission. Doesn’t she know anything about physical contact? She is lucky I’m not a violent kid.

“Who’s your councelor?”

I tell her because I’m hopeful and I’ve had it and I need to talk to someone. But I sit in her office and I talk to her, and I’m just angry. The more I say, the more I hate myself for saying it, and after a while, I just stop talking. She calls my parents because she says she has to. The cuts aren’t even that bad. She even says so- “They’re just little scratches), and she has no idea how pathetic that makes me feel. I’m regretting everything I’ve done this morning.

I open up my scabs again just a few minutes after I get back to class and have to run to the bathroom, but it’s too late; there’s blood all over my sleeve. I am disgusted with myself. I have sank so low. Just yesterday I had it all together. Now I’m dragging my nails along my arm, and sitting in a bathroom stall, angry, just like an animal. Next thing I know, I’ll be frothing at the mouth! I’m so pissed and miserable and I just want to hit my reset button and redo the last fifteen hours or so.

“But you can’t,” I whisper, astonished to hear my own voice. It’s me, the same me that was here before everything else, and the same me who is going to stick it out and deal with whatever comes my way. “All you can do is focus on getting better.”

I’m not better. In fact, I’m still pretty angry and confused and sad, but I’m determined, and I understand. I don’t know what makes me go crazy, but I know how to tell it’s coming. I can’t predict it exactly, and I don’t know it’s happened until it’s over, but I’m starting to take control, in those moments that I do have control of my brain. I am hopeful that someday, someday very soon, I can have control of my brain all the time. But not today, or right now, and I won’t panick about it, because panicking is bad, I suppose.

I am not a beast that can not be tamed. I am a girl who has decided that she wants to love herself, and who wants to search for a better feeling, to be present in everything that she does. I am still that girl who was excited to hang “positive self talk” on her wall, but I am also the girl who cuts herself. But, even more than that, I am someone who just wrote six vulnerable pages and is brave enough to share it with someone, in hopes that they could reach some understanding, or at least know that they’re not alone. I am the girl who wants, more than anything, to write something raw and honest and real, to change someone’s life, or at least make them feel something. But I am not better. And I want to get better. So, pulling myself together, I walk out of my stall and run my bleeding arm under the hot water. I rub soap in to the open wounds because I am still angry and broken enough to want to feel that pain. But I hold myself up and push myself forward, guided by the light that is trying so hard to come back to me, the light that pops out for a second here, an hour there, just enough to keep me going, until I get through this dark tunnel. Until I gain control.

Start writing here…