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. You start to think, Maybe I don’t need this anymore. Maybe I never did.

I stopped cutting because I always could have stopped cutting; that’s the plain and inelegant truth. No matter how compelling the urge, the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the urge, but the act itself was always a choice. I had no power over the flood tide of emotions that drove me to that brink, but I had the power to decide whether or not to step over. Eventually I decided not to.

Stopping, however, was not at all the same thing as ending the desire. Even now, I still sometimes ache with a fierce, organic need for cutting’s seductive, minimalist simplicity. I expect that I will always be the kind of person who is too much aware of the boundlessness of chaos; it’s like having an unfortunate sixth sense, alive to the teeming, invisible undercurrents of anarchy streaming past us as every moment. I don’t say it makes me stronger, or more interesting, or gives me character; it’s just a part of my fabric of self.