March 1 is Self-Injury Awareness Day.

[e_juliana]

fox1013 has written a very powerful post on it here.

What is self-injury? Self-injury is the active choice to physically harm oneself, without intent of suicide. Self-injury is the act of cutting, hitting, punching, stabbing, biting, poking. It's the act of pulling out hair or nails, of sometimes even removing a limb.

It's a coping mechanism. Not the healthiest, clearly, but it helps some people. Most of those people are intelligent young women. Self-injury can start earlier than puberty, but the most common ages are between 15 and 24. Odds are, you know at least one person who has self-injured. If you're on my friendslist, you know me.


I pulled my eyebrows, eyelashes, hair, body hair. I cut, I bit, I wouldn't let wounds heal.

You see, the pain? It helped bring me back to myself. It gave me something real and immediate to focus on, instead of the elaborate scenarios that my fucked-up brain concocts.


A lot of the old habits are still here, in muted form. My obsessiveness with my cuticles tends to result in a wound during times of high stress. I pluck my eyebrows quite often. I have to be very careful not to pick at scabs.

I've talked about my hysterical episodes before. They're scary and they suck, but they have replaced self-injuring as my overload coping mechanism, and I'm glad this is so. Hysterics may give me a headache, but the long-terms effects are much less than self-injury.


So, please, read fox1013's entry. She says it better than I can, and she has good literature to back her up. I don't think that I wouldn't have self-injured if I had known that it was a common response, but I do know that it would have helped to have someone else say, "Hey, I do that too. It can get better."

Thanks for reading.



I've removed comments, because there are some fucked-up people trolling out there. If you want to talk about it, you can email me through LJ. Thanks.