You might imagine that a person would resort to self-mutilation only under extremes of duress, but once I'd crossed that line the first time, taken that fateful step off the precipice, then almost any reason was a good enough reason, almost any provocation enough. Cutting was my all-purpose solution. My scars ought to be a charm bracelet of memonics, each a permanent reminder of its precipitating event, but maybe the most disturbing thing I can say about the history of my cutting is that for the most part I can't even remember the when’s and the whys behind those wounds. It didn't take much to make me cut. Frustration, humiliation, insecurity, guilt, remorse, loneliness... I cut 'em all out. They were like a poison, caustic and destructive, as though lye had been siphoned into my veins. The only way I could survive them, I thought, was to keep draining them from my blood.

How many cuts could I count? How many could I place in time and context? I had to admit that I couldn't remember the occasion of almost any of them, their catalysts, whether epic or mundane, completely obscured by time. So many moments of supposedly unendurable pain, now utterly forgotten. u start to think, Maybe I don't need this anymore. Maybe I never did I was trying to get equilibrium from two extremes: either I was so upset that I had to cut myself to relieve it, or I was so numb that I had to cut myself to get back to being there.

I take the blade and run it gently against my skin, it cuts in deeper and deeper, the blood bursts out and slowly runs down my arm then it stops and the pain goes away. Cutting doesn't solve anything or take the pain away, but for those few seconds everything is okay...

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Do you ever lay in bed at night hoping you wake up in the emergency room and hear the words "shes not going to make it?"