please read if you read my blog, if you care about me at all

There was a comment made that I am doing these things to get attention. I have made myself wait all day to post on it to try to sift through my feelings. But if you are reading this blog, it affects you I suppose, so I believe it's something I need to address.
I don't get angry very easily, and this comment made me very, very angry. It struck a nerve. I think it struck a nerve because that's what my mom always used to say, when I was in eighth grade. She said that I'm just doing things to get attention. Well the first thing I'd like to point out is that if someone is doing things to get attention, it is because they are very desperate for it, which probably means they need it. I mean if someone is cutting or something to manipulate, that's not okay, but if someone cuts in a visible place so people see that something is wrong... I think that there is a source of concern there to make sure that individual is okay, if they feel so ignored that they cannot even tell people how they feel, they have to show them. I have felt like that, like I needed to cut in order to feel like my feelings were valid. However, as I will now proceed to explain, the only person's validation I was trying to get was me.

I DO NOT SELF INJURE, TALK ABOUT SUICIDE, OR STRUGGLE WITH BULIMIA BECAUSE I WANT ATTENTION. I thought a lot today about whether the reason this comment made me so incredibly angry was because it was true. Sometimes we react to the truth with rage. But I have thought about it a lot, and it's not true.

I'm sure a lot of what I'm going to say here now won't make as much sense if you've never been extremely depressed or never been abused. But this is the truth:
The first time I ever cut, I cut my wrist. It was in seventh or eigth grade. It was mostly to get attention. I was somewhat suicidal (you have to be to cut your wrist, especially the first time, when you don't know how deep you can go before you'll die), but mostly I was reaching out. The next day I told two people, and they told my parents, and I started getting help. That was a somewhat isolated incident.
A few months later my real problems began. I felt so angry with myself all the time, and so depressed and miserable. I don't know how to explain a depression like that unless you've really suffered with depression. I don't think most of my friends understand the magnamity (I think I spelled that wrong) of these depressions. They're horrible. Anyway, I was so used to my mother hitting me all the time. I was used to being screamed at. I hated myself, and getting hit and screamed at was what I felt like I deserved. When my mom quit doing that, I was lost. I didn't know what to do when I felt that intense anger. And when my mom quit screaming at me and everything was when I started feeling so much anger at her that I couldn't handle it. I was more angry at her for not hitting me than I ever was at her for hitting me. So I remembered how wonderful it felt when I cut my wrist (I really do love pain. I dissociate almost immediately, but I can still live in the thrill of hurting myself). I started cutting because I couldn't handle it anymore. I didn't cut anywhere where people would see. I told no one. I wasn't doing it to get people to notice my pain. I was doing it because I didn't know how to live without being hurt.

Journal entries about the descent into cutting (*TRIGGERS* to SI-ers): 05-03-03, Anger, something I am not used to feeling. But lately it has slithered unnoticed into my life like a snake through tall grass. 05-04-03, It is my body bleeding numble on the floor and into the sink. Why does it not hurt me? How can I be immune to that intense of pain? 07-19-03, I haven't taken my medication in 11 days. I hate the way I feel off of it, but something inside of me that I don't understand keeps me from taking it. I can't go to sleep. The nightmares are waiting. I have trained myself to wake up at night so I don't slip into unwanted terror. 07-30-03, I HATE fighting with my mother. In those few blood-red instants of bitter argument, an oppressive hatred bubbles up from deep within me, a rage I have been trying so long to deny. I feel control slipping away and dissociation slipping in and then, if the argument reaches fever-pitch, my memory fails me. And later, looking back, once the rage and sickening hatred and cursed amnesia have slipped away and I am once more in control, I feel so... empty. So hollow and bent and finally broken. 08-02-03, "What was I like," I say, "when I was little?" Terry's eyes stare into mine. ..."You were also very, very guarded. You did not show much emotion besides anger. But you feared anger so greatly. When I aske dyou if you were mad, you would forcefully say 'NO!'. 08-26-03, I'm wondering if I'm screwed up because sometimes I want to die and sometimes I try to and sometimes I cut. Does that make me messed up crazy? I feel messed up. I wonder if all the world sees the pain in me. They must, because sometimes it's like pain's all I am. Pain and sarcasm and laughter tears. I'm having a hard time living without abuse. Abuse is all I've ever known, and it's so weird now that it's gone. Life doesn't make sense anymore. 08-28-03, Man I hurt, like glass going through my system. I want to go into the kitchen and stab myself deep in the heart with the butcher knife so my parents can see me die. When I'm in a lifeless heap on the floor, maybe Dad will start talking about money again and Mom will go back to making pasta salad. F them. I'll do that or take drugs, die slow. But Siobhan would kill me if I killed myself. It would kill Shauna. I think I'll just cut instead. I think I'll start cutting again. It's the only way to keep from killing myself. 09-04-06, People think lives fall apart in one tragic crash, one giant meltdown. But it's the little things, really. One resurfaced memory, one small mesh of cuts on your wrist, one week wtihout eating. It all adds up and before you know it everything is shattering. It deserved stitches and I sat there calmly and pressed 1/4 inch of my X-acto knife into it. It sahould have hurt like heck but I felt no pain as I jammed the knife into my leg, as I soaked up papertowel after papertowel of bright red blood. Six cuts on me right now. That's how life falls apart. Not in one huge, mindnumbing crash, but int he cuts that get deeper and deeper. ...And cutting... I guess it's to feel. I feel so, so numb all the time that I need to let it out. The cutting doesn't hurt my outsides but it hurts my insides, which is really more satisfying anyway. I'm just having such a hard time feeling. 09-12-03, Nothing was fair and I was worrie dinto a constant stomach and head-ache about everyone, all the people that make up my world, and I wanted so badly to shatter something but there was nothing but my heart and I wished someone could understand. 09-14-03, I think that I am committing emotional suicide. And I like it. I'm that much of a monster. I want to destroy myself so I am so physically and emotionally numb that I feel absolutely nothing, so there is no way anyone or anything can ever hurt me. Lately I have been hurting myself emotionally and physically every chance I get. Since I cannot kill myself, this is as close as I can get. Dear God, let me go. 09-21-03, Thursday night I took nine lithium. There are razorblade bites all over my legs. I was scared. My head hurt. I'd gained six pounds in two days. I woke up in another world... I went to the bathroom and threw up until there was nothing left in me. All of me ached and hurt. All of me twanged with fear. 09-30-03, I've been cutting every night in the shower. My upper legs are a solid mass of razor cuts... changing for gym is hard. I face the wall and pull my sweats up, holding my breath through the whole thing. Perhaps it's just a matter of time before somebody sees. 10-02-03, All the time I feel so distant, so far away. Day after day, week after week. I live above the world, disconnected.... I wonder what it would be like to stop fighting and let myself fall. I could be safe forever in a hospital. But my life. My life. 10-05-03, Will my life always be like this? I've been hurting myself routinely fore alwost a year. I told no one. By now I'm heavily addicted, I don't think I can ever stop. I can't remember the last time I was happy. I don't think I've ever really been happy. 10-07-03 Sleeping, eating, breathing, laughing... none of it seems to matter anymore. What's the point? All that's real in my life is pain and fear. I think that now I hate myself more than I ever have before in my whole life. ...I think that part of the reason I cut (besides that I hate myself and deserve to hurt) is that now that the abuse is over I just didn't know how to live without daily pain. So I replaced it with my own abuse.

That's how the cutting got bad. It was never about attention, not the daily cutting. It was about hating myself, needing to escape. That's still what it's about. I never learned how to deal with anger. I never learned how to live without abuse. Now, I cut because it lets me escape from extreme emotion. My first reaction to being told today that I do this for attention was to want to cut, because I was so angry and I never know how to handle anger.
I DO NOT CUT FOR ATTENTION. I CUT BECAUSE I LIKE THE FEELING OF HURTING MYSELF, BECAUSE I LIKE THE HIGH, I LIKE TO SEE THAT I AM HUMAN, I LIKE PUNISHING MYSELF, AND IT'S AN ALTERNATIVE TO KILLING MYSELF. I CUT BECAUSE IT MAKES ME FEEL BETTER, WHETHER I TELL YOU OR NOT. EVEN IF I STOPPED WRITING IN THIS BLOG, THAT'S STILL WHAT CUTTING WOULD BE ABOUT.

Journal entries about the eating disorder *ED*: 06-30-04, I can't eat anymore. It's partially that my stomach is shrunken. But mostly that I just can't. My brain won't let me. It purges me of dirty food. Emptiness is pure, clean. My brain screams for jogging miles on an empty stomach. 'Purity,' it tells me. The drab comfort of the eating disorder keeps me up. The numbers on teh scale go down and down. My muscle bulks from all the running; the remaining calories burn into ashes. I weigh my goal weight. Why am I not happy? Why am I not complete? 07-02-04, Mom says I look thinner. Craig says I look thinner. I am a monster in the mirror. I look fat to me. I always have. I always will. Until I am a stick figure, a bundle of skeleton-marrow, my hatred will crack the glass. 07-04-04, Sitting on the hard church pew, suicidal thoughts surging like siezures through my small body, I make a decision to tell Terry I can't take my meds. I am trapped in a wooden box. I know she may put me in the hospital for Friday and Saturday, but I don't care anymore. I almost want to be there. I need to. I am not safe out here. I need to stabilize. How unfathomably good it would feel to, just once, let the glue holding my insides tightly together melt a bit and scream at the trees. I HATE BIPOLAR! AND OCD! AND DISSOCIATION AND EATING DISORDERS AND THE ADDICTION OF SELF-INJURY!!! And sometimes the largest scream of all, I HATE BEING ME!!! If I don't do something soon bad things will happen. Cement will crumble. 07-08-04, I'm sitting there on TErry's couch when the quiet fibers of the universe start to bend. I can feel the elements crumbling, the sky collapsing. I want to tell her I'm suicidal but it just on't come out. ..."You know, I really want to hit you," Mom says, "it's amazing that I haven't." I splinter inside. "Go ahead!" I sob, "hit me! I don't care!" but she stays still. 'Take me to the hospital,' I'm screaming in my head. It won't come out. I am exhausted of living, exhausted of bipolar. I feel so hollow. 07-22-04, I've quit eating again. Nobody really notices. My head feels clearer, more complete without the octopus-ink of food in my stomach. I'm never hungry. Sticky candy gets caught in my throat and gags back up... And people say they love me, but do they really? And people say they care, but do they ever think of me? 07-24-04, Healing is such a fickle action, moving on is so much easier said that done. 07-25-06 I look in the mirror before getting in the shower. My upper body is very thin, my ribs defined, my muscles firm. Almost skeletal, for a moment. But my lower body is all fat. I believe all 110 pounds of me is riding in my butt. I look grotesque, a vivisection of a fat and thin lady gone wrong. I am mad at everything and nearly everyone right now. I feel sick with pungent anger; I hate the nausea. It saps me of energy, makes me exhausted, always in need of more sleep. I don't want to go through this cycle again. I'm sick of being alone. There is more to life than this. Part of why I"m so miserable is that long ago I fell comfortably into the role of the abused, thought it was my job. Now, still desperate for abuse, I don't fight it. 08-02-04, I feel so fat. All I ate today was a taco and a bite of brownie, but the brownie was a slip, a sign of weak character. I'm 109 pounds now and I am a bohemoth when I look in the mirror. ...But I can't live like this. Nobody understands me. I have no one to talk to. I am so alone, burying land mines in my heart like I don't know they'll explode someday and kill me. 08-03-04, I don't take them all at once this time, but in groups of four. They slide down easily with Diet Sprite. Half a brownie is in my stomach, and it's coming out. Shoving a finger down doesn't work, and there is no Ipecac syrup. But this always works. Always. The afternoon is terrible. I always forget the horror of lithium overdoses. On the internet desperate posts are met with scolding: you need help. I know it. I know I'm bulimic. But knowing it changes nothing. I don't know what to do. There is no one to talk to. Ghosts of the past have faded. Three hours after eating the brownie, I hang over the toilet and puke it back up. Vomting is spectacularly asphyxiating. Half-digested food swims int eh toilet. Tears are hot on my cheeks. ...There is purity in the purge that balances the dirty feeling of the binge. I feel miserable but there's no one listening to me crying. All I want is somebody to understand, to care. I'm sick of being alone. I'm sick of hurting myself. I am glad to have the food out of me, I feel cleaner. But I hate myself for needing this. In the end, my tears are nothing, uncared for and unnoticed, only two small splashes in a toilet bowl. Most of the tears won't come. They are bottled up inside of me, sloshing around when I walk, forever unreachable. 08-04-04, I've been on-off bulimic for a few years now. I don't like it. The relationship is heavily abusive. ...To my friends, my face is blurred into the wallpaper. They still believe that I am a rock. They odn't know that when you smash me open I'm just another geode lined with shattered crystal. 08-05-04, Olivia buys me a decaf coffee smoothy. I want to slip it in the trash, but Olivia would notice, so I slurp the whole thing down. Later, at home as I pop fiber laxatives, I decide to take care of myself. I will be brave. I will tell Kristin. I will, I will. 08-08-04, Dad mentions suicide again and my mind closes. I go into the bathroom and make myself throw up my dinner of salad and a chunk of bread. My face is pale and pallid as it struggles to shatter the cold prison of the mirror. 08-09-04, Finally breaking the barrier between embarrassment and necessity I try not to blush as the laxatives are rung up in Safeway. This morning inordinate amounts of lithium purged my nauseated system. Later, running painfully on an empty stomach and a twisted knee, I realize I'm going ot start school shattered again, lost, no better than last year, no progress made. Again and again I'm losing it. 08-11-04, The box says dependable, says overnight, says gentle. I agree with the first two. But at 5:00 a.m. when I wake up with my bowels roiling and on fire, I don't agree with the last one. I sit stiffly on the toilet, a statue of pain, nausea coursing through me. I'm goign to throw up all over myself, I really am. 08-14-04, WHen I think I"ll never wear just a swimmingsuit again, I hate myself for what I've done, what I'm doing. But there is an instant when time stops, when the sun hangs in the air like a pale frisbee, when the clocks turn to mud, and you feel hollow, so horribly empty... you feel nothing. And life becomes a nightmare, as you wonder through the numbness or the anger whether you will ever feel again. That is when the steel comes. It is a desperation, and the pain is a comfort, a reassurance that you are not as numb as you feel. The eating disorder is a battle for control. The cutting is a double-edged sword- one side against the numbness, one side against my throat. So I hate it. But I need it.

There's more, oh so much more, agony in my journals relating to mental illness, self injury, and bulimia. I think, though, that hopefully those entries will show you that my main problem all along is that I never did anything for attention, I never asked for it when I needed it, when I could, I never let people know I was cutting, never told anyone I was throwing up until I told Amanda my sophomore year. For years before that I was so alone in the isolation. My reasons for both the bulimia and the cutting are I think explained pretty well in those passages.

This blog began as a way to reaffirm myself, to psychoanalyze, and it has become exactly what I have been accused of self-injuring for- a way to get attention. I am incapable, for some reason, of acting how I feel in real life. My friends never know I'm depressed. I can't act depressed. Sometimes I am able to say things to try to express my depression, but mostly everyone thinks I'm just great. I can't really talk to my friends that I see on a daily basis. I have self-injured and binged and purged to cope. I can't explain how horrible mental illness is if you haven't experienced it. It, not attention, led me to my problems. It and the abuse in my past. Now, I still don't cut for attention. I swear to you with all my heart that every time I cut it is because I feel like I can't experience another moment of life with the emotions (or lack of) I am experiencing. It is rarely, rarely for attention. Every time I overdose on drugs it is because I feel like I can't stand this world anymore. It is not for attention. Every time I throw up or take laxatives it is because I need control and believe I am fat. It is not for attention. I have always been so bad about getting attention. I've always been so guarded.

This blog, though, is a plea for help. I has been ever since the first person posted in it (who hasn't posted in it for a very long time). It has been ever since I realized that I have finally found a place where I can express myself. I want to promise all of you that my self-injurious actions are not to get your attention. I know that I already have your attention. Posting about how I feel and what I do on this blog is to get your attention. This is all that I have. You that read this... you are the only people that know me, the real me. Your love is the reason I get up every day and yank myself through these unbearable hours. Your support is the reason I keep posting endlessly about things that probably bore you to death. Yes, I am seeking attention, but not through my actions... through my words. That is the only way I believe I can seek attention. Something inside of me won't let other people know about the cutting or the eating disorder or anything. Very few people know that about me. To nearly everyone, I am the kid who's good at math and plays a bajillion orchestra instruments. They would be very surprized to know the things that I write on here. You are my support. You are my attention.

I have been misunderstood, which is understandable :-) I know in my heart that the reason I do these things is still the same reason it has always been: addiction, depression, loss of abuse. It has not turned into attention seeking actions. I have never let people see my cuts (only scars) or notice my eating disorder. I have so many lies and excuses to cover me up. But this blog, this is the truth. So I'm sorry, but you're wrong. It's not so simple as just deciding to get better. I can't do that. I keep doing it over and over again and I keep being thwarted by the messed up channels of seratonin in my mind. I won't use that as an excuse. I know I have to keep fighting. But people... I am fighting. I am giving this all that I've got. I have never been one to give up. I have never been one to use half-hearted efforts. This is me trying. You are my reasons for temporarily getting up every morning. But I have always had reasons in my heart for living. They have been what kept me from suicide for all those years before I could explain to anyone the horrors in my head.

I love you. In a way I am using you. But please never view my actions as attempts to get attention. I have a way with words. I can write well... artculately, eloquently. I don't need actions to get your attention when I have my words.

Love is real, even if everything else in this world can't hold. Love can hold.

(and to the person that left that comment- I know everything else that you said was true, and I know that you are right about many things, and I know that you love me, and I love you too)