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I'm thinking about starting a blog, because verbalizing my feelings and making myself comfortable with sharing them with others has been an important part of beginning to feel better. Until I do, I want to share this experience here.
I have an impulse control problem that Ive developed over the last couple of weeks. Its new, so I dont know what to do about it yet, but its also fresh enough that I can think about it critically. Ive been dealing with depression for a while. Probably. Its self diagnosed, but after a year of constantly telling myself that I was depressed but didnt have depression, Ive decided that even if I am depressed because of legitimately bad circumstances, more than a year of anxiety attacks, sobbing, and suicidal intentions makes it something worth dealing with like depression. The circumstances, after all, are out of my control. Being able to admit all of this to myself only happened within the last month, after thinking for the first time about suicide scared the crap out of me. Right when I thought I was making progress, I didnt expect to face a setback this large.
Sometimes bad things take me by surprise in good moments, and everything else melts away. It is important to understand that with depression, good moments can still happen, they can even happen most of the time, but in the bad moments none of them matter. In the really bad moments none of them exist. In the worst moments they will never happen again.
Normally, when I have bad moments, and this is almost every day and often for several hours, I shut down, I sob, I lay in bed, and I reach out to my best friend. I feel like I want to disappear, and sometimes I think the words, Im going to kill myself, over and over again as a strangely comforting mantra that has worn itself into meaninglessness and thats blaring repetition blocks out the more painful thoughts about why, and who it would hurt, and how. Ive never considered hurting myself or taking action on my thoughts, but Ive wanted to feel enough pain that the pain was the only thing I could think about, and Ive wished something would happen that was out of my control. Whenever I thought about hurting myself, I cringed at the idea of the pain, and when that wasnt enough I worked myself up to fixate on the pain it would cause my family and friends, and the guilt the two people Ive told about my suicidal urges would be burdened with if they hadnt moved to stop me. I could never do that to the people I love. Or rather, the people who love me, which is, I think, a smaller circle.
Last week something happened, just a painful reminder or an uncomfortable thought, and without thinking about it I picked up a small knife off of my desk and ran it across my skin below the wrist. I didnt panic, I didnt cry, and I didnt shut down. I calmly watched myself pull the knife blade across the soft, white, insensitive underside of my arm over and over again, pushing harder each time, but never too hard or hard enough. The knife was a small curved blade that flipped out of a wooden handled travel-corkscrew my friend sent me for my recent 21st birthday. It felt heavy, and smooth, and organic in my hand and the curve of the small blade fit around the curve of my arm. It didnt cut. It was intended only to break through the foil covering of a cork so the blade is dull and thick. Even the point at the end left only a dark impression on my skin. I dont know if I was disappointed, but I just kept pressing harder until I realized it wasnt going to go through. Then I folded the knife back into the carved handle and sat at my desk shaking until I cried.
I keep doing it. Hoping that the knife will go through, and hoping that it wont. Watching the bright red lines appear up and down my arms in the places where I applied pressure. When you dont actually break the skin the marks disappear quickly. Nobody would know. I started to want it to go through. I thought about where I could have a scar and not have it called out. Not my arm. Maybe my leg. More than once I pulled down my pants to my knees and sat in the chair digging the knife into my thigh.
These arent moments of irrationally heightened emotion. Unlike my usually bouts of depression they are moments I dont really think about. Its just something I do. Usually I try the hardest to push through when something has just happened, but I do it sometimes now when I am just sitting at the desk struggling to find motivation to start my homework. All the guilt and fear and sadness come afterwards.
I put the knife away yesterday. An hour later I walked over to the pantry and brought over another one. This one is a real knife. Its sitting next to my computer. Somehow it doesnt scare me. I think this one could really cut me, but Ive come to believe that I cant really cut me. That makes me feel a lot more comfortable, but I still dont know how to stop the self-destructive impulse to go through these clearly unhealthy motions. Im ashamed that I do this, like Im ashamed that I have depression at all. I cant figure out why I cant just be ok and move on and keep living a normal happy life, but I cant. I look around me every day during these last moments of my college career, and know Im wasting time I cant get back.
Verbalizing these things seems to be helping me more than too much else has over the last year, so as long as Im talking about it, Im just going to go ahead and say Ive learned and Im going to stop. Im going to try that.
edited by Rain45 Moved to Self Harm forum due to forum Restructuring
