Late-Night Blog About Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms · 8:37am May 5th, 2020
Gonna be a lot of rambling about self-harm in this. Y'all have been warned.
This may come as a huge shock, but I struggle with self-harm. Wild, I know. It's almost like I have ten!!!!!!!!!! stories with the self-harm/suicide tag or something. I'm actually dealing with some pretty bad urgesssss right now, so I'm writing this as a way to constructively get those feelings out I guess. Or maybe I just want to rant and rave because I'm a slut for attention, who knows.
It's weird to talk about self-harm in such a casual manner, but I guess that's kind of the point of this blog (if there is a point at all). Every once in a while, I have to remind myself that self-harm is not a normal part of most people's lives.
For a brief while (until I irreparably fucked it up by hospitalizing myself for having Bad Urges to do a Bad Thing), I worked at a mental health clinic that specialized in DBT. For those who don't know, Dialectical Behavior Therapy is one of the only effective forms of treatment for personality disorders like borderline. There's a specific skill in DBT called "behavior chain analysis" that I want to talk about for a sec.
That awkward moment when therapy looks like homework from the third grade.
Recently, I've been thinking about how I got sucked into such a particularly nasty habit in the first place. Working backwards, I'm gonna fill in some of these blanks.
Consequences? I look gross and feel gross and hate myself even more than I would otherwise.
Problem behavior? Doing stupid things with sharp objects.
Body sensations? Oof owie ouch.
Emotions? Shame, guilt, anger, sadness, envy, disgust.
Thoughts? I hate this, I hate myself, I deserve it, etc etc.
Prompting event...?
Uhh...
That's where I get stuck.
I honestly, truly have no effing clue when or how or why I started hurting myself. There are two somewhat general answers, I guess? I first started hurting myself with sharp things the summer before I started high school, but I had been hurting myself in various other ways since I was 11. Biting, scratching myself with my nails, stuff like that. What's tricky is that I don't know if that counts as self-harm in the traditional sense because, I mean, duh. For the longest time I didn't really consider that stuff self-harm for the sake of pinpointing when my problems started, but after talking with my therapist about it, that just seems like willful ignorance.
That's just so fucking crazy to me though. I don't know why I didn't think about how weird it was that I was hurting myself from the age of 11 until a couple weeks ago. Like, that's not normal at all. If I think about an 11 year old, just a little kid, and imagine her doing the same things I did... It makes my fucking heart ache. I was just a child. What the fuck happened? Where'd I go so wrong? How'd I even start it in the first place? I don't know, but it doesn't really make much of a difference at this point.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that a lot of my own emotions get projected onto characters in my stories. When it comes to how I feel about my history of self-harm, I think Sunset from Best Left Forgotten said it best:
Every night I would hurt myself, even when I didn’t feel like I needed it. After a while, it became like... Like a way to pass the time, just another thing to do.” She sighed, sinking further into the cushions. “Eventually it was the only thing to do.”
I've been hurting myself for over half my life, but it was only at some point in the past few years that I really started to... I dunno, pay attention to it? Like, before, it was just this thing that was kinda out of sight and out of mind, even for me. It happened, yeah, but I didn't really pay it much thought. I know it happened for obvious reasons, but I can't really remember it all that well, or how I felt about it. It wasn't a really significant part of my life. Until it suddenly and abruptly was.
I used to be so different. I was never especially popular or social, but I used to have IRL friends whom I saw every once in a while. I used to have goals, a job, classes, an internship, things I could be proud of. But the more difficult life was, the more stressed out I became and the more I turned to hurting myself as a way of coping. Things fell by the wayside--I stopped going to classes, I let friendships lapse, I had to leave my internship--all because I kept getting worse and worse and worse. The things that defined my life got knocked down one at a time, and the broken pieces were used to build the only remaining pillar of my identity that I have left.
Self-harm is such an integral part of who I am that were I to stop, I feel like I'd be losing a piece of myself in the process. I read and write about it, talk about it, think about it non-stop, every single day. But the scary thing is... I don't really know when that shift happened. I don't know when it went from this thing in the back of my head to being an addiction. It was before I wrote Last Light--half the reason I wrote that stupid fic was to get those thoughts out of my head--but I can't help but wonder if I'm enabling myself more and more with every new story about Sunset or Wally with scars all over themselves.
Even if I am, well... I don't want to write about anything else, so it's not like I'm about to stop. I'm sure there's more than one person who'll read that and roll their eyes and scoff and sneer and think I'm an idiot. And I mean, they're right, but I'm an idiot who likes writing about her idiot problems. I won't apologize for that.
As much as I joke, I know it's wrong to hurt myself. I know it's unhealthy, and I know I need to stop. I'm almost a week clean at the time of writing this, and I want to believe I'll be able to hold myself together, but I don't know how long I can keep it up. I don't know how long I want to keep it up.
I can't remember what life was like before I felt like this. And I can't imagine what life would be like if I stopped.
Was there a point to typing all this out...? I don't frickin' know, man. It's 4:30 am and I feel like crap, just let me have this.
If there's anything anyone takes away from this stupid so-late-at-night-that-it's-actually-early-in-the-morning rant, let it be this. Please, please never hurt yourself. Whenever I started, and whenever I made it worse by starting to use razors a few years later, I wasn't thinking about future me. I wasn't thinking about how that one little scratch would be the first of hundreds, the first of a habit-turned-addiction that slowly took over more and more of my life until it was the only thing I had left.
I wish I could talk to her, y'know? I wish I could go back to that little baby Scampy and tell her no, tell her to do something else, anything else, just not this, please not this. I wish I could save her from the fear of short sleeves, the disgusted glares of her mother, the stays in the psych ward, the years of therapy and medication and treatments that only ever wind up in the same pit that she didn't even know she was digging until it was too late to find her way back out again.
I hate this. I hate what I've done to myself. I hate that I want to do it even more.
If you read this far, thank you for indulging in this weird-ass rant. I'm hungry as fuck so I'm gonna stop typing this and eat chocolate chip cookies that I really should be trying to ration because I'm an adult and no one can stop me.
Be smarter than me, y'all. Shouldn't be too hard, the bar is pretty low already.
~Scampy
It’s past four here also. I dip in and out of similar habits myself, but I don’t think I’ve ever been at the point where this is how obsessive/hyper focused I get.
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Good.
*hug* You're a good person.
I can relate to starting self harming at a young age. At some point in elementary school I started repeatedly bashing my head against objects. My desk, my door, walls... I've hit my head unintentionally a lot over the years, but I wonder how much of my brain damage dates back to that period of time. After that though my self harming turned internal until I eventually started cutting. I don't really know where I'm going with this and I know we don't really know each other but just... hugs.
Awwww.
*hugs*
Coping is hard, and made harder by bad coping mechanisms becoming so engrained.
I love you.
Scammpy am so sorry I really don’t know what to say. I know I have some problem habits myself and I fail with fighting them off but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that bad and I wouldent know where to start with dealing with that. am just sorry you had to go through that and for what it’s worth which is probably not much but for what’s its worth I believe in you and that you can beat it.
All the hugs I can give
It comes out of nowhere, and it can be hard to pin down. My wife struggled for years (decades!) to try and find her inciting incident - she could pin down the moment it started but not a why. It hit her out of the blue one day - completely out of context - and months later she still occasionally stops and has a short panic attack at remembering the moment of realization. So you're far from alone there.
We believe in you, and care about you. Here's to eight days, and eating cookies at 4am.
I'm a shitty one to talk, but there's three things I've... kinda found to work. Like markers and ice cubes. Y'know, like... trace marker instead of blades, and if you want pain, use ice cubes.
If you're cool with it, try dying your hair. Any color you like, however much you like, so that you can look in the mirror and say I like one thing about myself. If you relapse, dye it a different color. I did purple.
And lastly, maybe try writing, but not a story. Grab a piece of paper and make notes, just for you, like your weight in the afternoon DOESN'T COUNT, or You look your greatest when you feel like a damn queen, or Say out-loud one thing you love about yourself.
Suggestions. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Hang tight.
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I do have friends who have gotten to the point where they favor the Bad Thing you write so much about though, and it's awful when they're at those lows.
Late reply, but <<< HUGS >>> Scampy.
I haven't had to battle with cutting, but have fought with other self destructive behaviors. It's not something I was able to face alone. The more I isolated, the worse I became.
A few years ago, I ended up getting paralyzed, and in the hospital. My family disowned me, thinking it was my fault I got sick. I was locked away for about a week with no family visits, no wife. No kids. No phone calls. I felt completely alone.
I was alone in my room, wishing I could die, and I remembered how much my daughter and I loved this show. I dug up my phone, and ended up on this site. A few stories later, I didn't feel so depressed, and started to think about the good times I had with my family before I got sick.
TL;DR - I shared with some people on the site, and I found they accepted me. I started getting better, emotionally.
What I'm trying to say, and failing horrible at it, is you all were there for me. I have friends, finally, who accepted me.
Fellowship, kindred souls. I stopped isolating myself. Eventually my family came back into my life. Life got better.
Fellowship. Friendship is magic. Call it whatever. Being a part of this helped me become more the person I wanted to be, and not the person I feared I had become. And you have been a part of that. Thank you.
It's only 11 PM here. I don't have an excuse. All out of ice cream too, drat.
❤️🧡💛💚💙💜 I enjoy your stories a lot. And I hope you can find your way through this tough time you’re in. I’m always here if you need to talk.
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Lots of love to you and your family. ( not including the ones who could treat you so horribly)