Coping
Trigger warning: graphic discussion of self harm.
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I have a deep-rooted belief that I deserve to suffer. I don't know what I did to deserve it; I'm not able to apply that kind of analysis. This belief is totally irrational. It's also abnormal. It comes from my trauma, because my mental illnesses are all connected to one another.
I am also aware that hurting myself will hurt others. My mother saw the cuts on my arm and cried harder than I had when the razor was in my hand; and the people who love me have told me that I'm too hard on myself (not always in those words, but that is the prevailing sentiment). So I hide. I stop self harming not because it's good for me but because showing my pain takes up space.
Cutting is aesthetically pleasing to me. I like looking at the blood on my skin, and after, the way the scars change and eventually, maybe, disappear. I like the sting of the blade as it slices my skin; it pulls me out of the numbness and into a sort of mild panic, an intensity because I have to wash and bandage the cuts.
Something adjacent to cutting is body modification. It's a different sting, the tattoo needle or the piercing needle, but it stings nonetheless, and sometimes I need to sting. To hurt. To control what hurts me. Black ink in my skin is pretty; jewelry in my skin is pretty. Tattoos are also a way of keeping things I love (seriously or shitpostingly) close to me.
And this would be all right, if metal in my skin didn't also hurt some of the people who love me and who have power over me, if tattoos on my body could be seen as a normality and not as a Thing I need to explain, if I could get the VFD eye on my ankle and not need to worry about covering it up until the one time I forget and everything crashes down around me. In a twisted way it is exactly this which makes me suffer; only it's mental and emotional suffering, which I already have covered, and more is like one too many helpings of mashed potatoes at Christmas dinner. It lumps in my stomach, cold, hard, unyielding, and I can't even cry.
Yes, I may sound spoilt. I'll own that. I want to live without conflict between my wants and others' wants for me. Perhaps that want, at its core, conflicts with someone else's wants for me. I don't know. I want a coping mechanism that won't indirectly cause me to relive my trauma, that is acceptable to my parents, that doesn't make me feel guilty. I want a way to hurt myself that gives me something back. I want, I want. I hold tension in my body; I meditate, I sleep, I breathe, the tension is still there. I'm tired.
This goes back to the problem I was trying to work out two years ago: I can't find the balance between hurting others and hurting myself, and I see no middle ground where I am right now. Because I believe that I deserve to suffer, I don't advocate for myself as much as I might, and I end up closer and closer to burnout as time goes on.
I'll close with the only lyric I remember from a song I wrote a couple of years ago.
what good does self awareness do
if you don't change, you stay the same, the same old you
how much more of myself can I take
just keep on living til I finally break