Origins

I am not going to go into too much detail about my early years; I have no desire to upset the people I love with past mistakes, and also it would bore you senseless. However there are some things you need to know for my story to make sense.

I am the oldest child in my family, and in the beginning it was just me and my baby sister. I was not popular in primary school, nor unpopular. I was just one of those kids who landed somewhere in the middle - I was never excluded from games and parties,but I preferred the company of a book. When I think back to being in primary school, the strongest image is of the small library. A place of endless worlds to crawl into, they were and still are a wonderful escape from reality.

I have few memories before the age of seven, and their reliability is questionable, given how future experiences can colour our recollections of the past. But there is never a sense of my parents being happy and in love. I know there was love in my life, my parents loved me, my grandparents loved me and by all accounts I loved being a big sister. But my parents always exist separately in my mind. When I was six they separated, and thus began the worst dissolution of a marriage in recorded history(with the exception of murder, beheading, and child abduction of course). Perhaps your parents marriage crumbled too, and you would argue that my experience was nothing in comparison. But that's the thing, our experience of these events is relative to the world as we see it. So for me, in my world at that time, I can say it was the worst divorce ever. I remember being afraid, worried, confused, and a lot of the time it felt that I was being torn in half. My world was a place of anger, of instability, and most of all it was a place where I had no control.

This turbulent and volatile situation continued for years, and although nobody would know it at the time, it would forever change me. By the time I was 11 I had picked up a half brother(from my dad), a step-sister and a step-dad(mum). This time I'm not going to pull any punches; my step-dad did not want me. I will never believe otherwise, no matter what anyone says. By the time he came into my life I was definitely a little bit weird. I did not have the bubbly and loveable demeanor of my sister. I was sullen and withdrawn, my universe was growing ever darker and it was starting to show. Along with my new home came a new school, and I went from drifting in the middle to the bottom of the pack. In both of my parents homes I felt unwanted; in school I was unwanted. There is only one conclusion I could come to: I was the problem.

Upstairs bathroom. Soft cream carpet. Nail scissors. Relief.

That's all I can recollect from the first time I self harmed. I was twelve. I don't know where I got the idea to try it. I can't remember what prompted it, why I locked myself in that bathroom and scratched those tiny scissors across my arm over and over. All I know is that I did it and just like that I was hooked. As I sit here typing this, I want to reach back through time and rip the scissors from my hands before the ever touched my unblemished skin. I don't know what I would say to soothe my younger self; eighteen years later and I still don't have right tools to cope when I feel like I am drowning in my emotions. But that day, that moment was the beginning of something that I can never escape. Even if one day I reach a point where I can say I will never cut, scratch, burn or hit myself again, I can never really move on. I can never forget that I hated myself so much, that I felt so low and so beaten down that I continually assaulted my own flesh. Some of the scars have faded with time, others I have been able to cover with tattoos - desperately trying to reclaim my body, to hide my shameful acts - but there will always be those that will never heal. They will stare up at me every day, elicit inquiring or repulsed glances from others. For the rest of my life I will be marked, damaged. For the rest of my life I will see that cream carpet.

I try not to be ashamed of my scars; they are a part of my story, a part of me. And yet, if I had the chance, I would wrap my arms around that twelve year old and tell her that she is not broken. That she does not need to hurt herself on the outside to try and quiet the chaos inside her. There are other choices, a different path to trod down. It may not be an easy one, but that moment of release will be just that, a moment. It will not stop whatever is causing the hurt inside you. That sense of control it gives you is a lie, you will be a slave to those sharp edges. I am thirty now, and sometimes, when I am looking at the destruction written across my arms with regret, I will be holding a razor blade. That is the sad truth of my life, I am always one bad second from that cream carpet.