It's hard to overcome bad habits. A bad habit gets out of control and turns into an addiction. A need, a want. It turns into that annoying itch that you don't want to ignore anymore.
Everyone has their own demons, skeletons in their closets, and one of mine, in particular, is cutting. It's no secret, I have mentioned in numerous times that I self-harm and I struggle daily to not feed into the constant urges that fester in my head.
Cutting, to me, is a form of grounding myself back into reality when I'm slipping through my last shreds of sanity. It's like when you pinch yourself to wake up from a dream. I need to be woken up, snapped back into the present. I need the sting of the blade across my skin. I also cut as a way of punishing myself for doing something wrong. I do that, as my therapist says, because I was emotionally and physically abused and by my parents.
My dad was never the patient kind and always went off the deep end whenever I would get myself into trouble. I remember being locked away, in a room, for hours on end as a toddler because he just did not want to deal with a rambunctious kid. I think this is also why I don't like being alone, but that's a whole other topic. My dad would beat us so badly that my mother would send one of us, I have one brother and one sister, to check up on the other just to see if we were okay. My dad also had a way of making whatever self worth you had dissipate within seconds, not to say my mother was any better.
Both of my parents hit us when we were kids. My mother, however, liked to use whatever was nearest to her. I remember her throwing a fire detector at my head. It was pretty crazy. My dad was in the navy and my mother spent most of the time taking care of three children. She was pretty much a single parent. It was hard dealing with her, growing up with her. I love my mother to death, but she made me crazy. She lives in her own little, scary world, and she drug us in with her, down the rabbit hole. My mother's an angry, scared woman suffering from manic depression and PSTD. The hurt and emotional pain she caused us, me, had been enough to break my core. I had many meltdowns with her hovering over me, mocking me.
I grew up thinking I needed to hurt myself in some way when I had done something bad. It was molded into my brain. I needed to treat myself badly because that is what I deserved. It was what I knew.
My therapist tells me to think of little me, and tells me if I would hurt little me. I, of course, shake my head no. Why would I hurt a little, innocent, child. The sad thing is, I do. I hurt little me all the time. She tells me to think of it that way. And, to be honest, it doesn't really work, but I think about it when I am rational. It makes me sad.
There's also beauty in all of this, in my eyes. I find my scars to be aesthetically pleasing. They are me, and complete me. They tell a story without having to say anything. I like grazing my fingers across them. I like the feel of my scars on my fingertips and it reminds me that I am strong. My family wants to rid of any evidence of my self-harming and always pester me to use scar creams to fade them out. I don't use it regularly because I don't want them to fade. I don't want a piece of me to fade away because other people are uncomfortable with it.
Yes, I am strong. I am strong because I have yet to give up on life. The scars remind me of that. They remind me of my battle against my own mind, my psychological issues.
jbbartram-illu
gummygunk
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
origamiaround
ellievsbear
