When sitting down to write articles I struggle. I never know what to write about because there are some things about myself and my life that I don't feel quite ready to share with parts of the world. But I have a story to tell, and it's time I stop being ashamed of it.
This is about me. This is about you. This is about your sister. Your brother. Your neighbor. Your classmate. Your teammate. This is about every single person who has had to endure so much emotional pain that the only way to stop it was to transform it into a different kind of pain.
This is about Self Harm.
We aren't supposed to talk abut self-harm. We are supposed to be ashamed.
It is not shameful.
It's hard to imagine how much pain you have to be in to get to the point where causing yourself physical pain is the only way to get through the day unless you've been there. Whether it's by dragging a blade across your skin, scratching and scratching at your skin, burning, carving, hitting, piercing, hair pulling or anything else. It takes an incredible amount of emotional pain to get to the point where those things are your only options.
Self-harm doesn't make sense to everyone. It doesn't make sense to most people. People will call it attention seeking. People will call it dramatic. People will say it makes us weak.
If we are doing it for attention, so what? It's our only way of saying that we need help, and we are begging for it.
If it's dramatic, so what? The pain we feel is dramatic.
You want to say it's weak? You haven't felt the pain we feel. You don't know the acts we put on during the day to look cheerful for everyone around us. You don't know how much pain we have held inside of us with no other way to release it.
We are the perfectionists.
The people who try their hardest to make everyone else happy.
The people who can't admit it when they're upset.
The people who put others needs/happiness before our own.
The people who never ever put ourselves first.
The people afraid to ask for help.
We are the people who have nothing to be ashamed of.
The people who are strong.
The people who have fought and are fighting the demons within them each and every day.
The people who struggle with urges every day.
The people who are triggered by things that seem insignificant.
The people smiling brightly.
The people making up excuses for stray marks on their bodies because for some reason, admitting that the pain was too much isn't acceptable.
The people who are finally learning that it is okay to ask for help.
The people who are learning that they are a priority.
We are people who have struggled with self-harm. We are not self-harmers. We are not defined by the ways in which we have had to manage our pain. We are not defined by how we had to cope with the wounds the world inflicted.
We are people.
We are not self harm.
