I’ve never told anybody this before.

When I was 16 years old, I was at the peak of a very dark place.

Everything really started when I was twelve. I hated myself, and everybody else hated me, whether it was too my face or behind my back. I allowed people to walk all over me because I wanted to have friends, no matter how little they were actually friendly. Just people I could sit with at lunch, or talk to during class. I hated being alone. I still do. I started cutting a few months after I turned twelve, when I overheard one of my “friends” talking about it with someone else.

I toom one of the dispoable razors my mother had bought me and I cut myself for the first time. They were just small scratches at first, barely breaching the skin. My wrists only have one scar as a reminder of the time when I was still learning.

At one point my sisters discovered my secret because I was wearing fingerless gloves, even right after I got out of the shower. They confronted me – I convinced them to keep my secret, after promising that I wouldn’t do it anymore. I lied. They didn’t live with us, so it wasn’t like they’d ever figure it out. I started cutting my thighs after that night.

One day, my parents saw the remaining scabs on my wrists. I claimed they were from the dogs. No more questions were asked.

My freshman year of high school, I went to school wearing a large hoodie. I’d pulled the sleeves up during lunch, and a girl I’d thought was my friend, had seen the scabs on my wrists. She just laughed really loudly, and said loud enough for everyone at the table to hear, “God, way to seek attention.” A few months after my sisters discovered my secret, my parents found out. I’d been visiting with my eldest sister when i received a call from my mother. She was screaming at me. She was angry at me for cutting myself, and told me when I got home, we were going to have a long talk. My sisters took me to the park, and asked if I’d kept my promise. I said yes. They asked if I’d moved the cutting elsewhere on my body, and I played stupid and asked, “You can do that?” They believed me.

The next day I went home.

My mother screamed at me for an hour, and blamed me for how much I was hurting. I said it was because she kept taking her anger out on me, no matter who’s fault it was. It was because everything was boiling up together and I had nobody I could turn to – obviously my sisters hadn’t kept my secret, because the excuse my mother used of her finding my journal was a lie, because my journal was well hidden, with a lock on it. It hurt.

She didn’t try to get me help. She didn’t offer help. She didn’t do anything for me.

Nobody did, so I continued cutting my thighs, and I never told anybody the truth. That I was hurting. So much so that I couldn’t even put it into words. I was only thirteen, and I believed everything wrong with me was my fault, and that I deserved every ounce of pain thrown my way. It didn’t make it hurt less, but it made keeping the secret easier. It made making a fake personality so much easier.

In January, a few months after I’d turned sixteen, my sisters broke my heart. They’d made me a promise, which I should have known better than to believe, but obviously, I was so desperate for some form of happiness, that I was willing to believe anything anybody told me. Even if I knew it was a lie. When January came around, my sister messaged me to tell me she was in the same state, in the town with my eldest sister. I asked when they’d come to pick me up – she said “I leave tomorrow.” My eldest sister lived three hours away. It may seem like a really stupid reason to be as hurt as I am – even to this day – but they knew how much getting away from our mother would have meant to me. Even if for a few simple hours. They knew how much the promise meant to me. But they hadn’t kept it.

Why would they? They gained nothing from keeping it.

I was just a useless piece of crap that nobody could put in any effort into caring about.

That’s when my cutting got really bad. It bordered on addiction – I couldn’t feel anything without the need to cut myself. When I was happy I felt undeserving. When I was sad, I just wanted to make it go away. When I was angry I painted my thighs with blood so thick it ran down my thighs in tidal waves.

When the guy I was practically in love with told me he was my friend only because he felt obligated, I got worse.

And I kept getting worse, as the names and insults and bull shit kept getting thrown at me in school. At one point, I’d even taken a razor blade with me to school because I grew so desperate that I’d have to go in a stall and cut myself whenever the urge struck.

This is around the time it all peaked.

I don’t remember what triggered it – I don’t even remember how I ended up with the bottle of pills. I just remember sitting on my bedroom floor, swallowing them one by one for nearly thirty minutes. I was staring up at this poster of my favorite band – they’d written and performed one of the songs that was pivotal in helping me control the loneliness and pain – and I was sobbing harder than I’d ever sobbed. I kept whispering “I’m sorry” to the poster over and over and over again. I apologized for being a waste, and for failing them. Because I had to give in because it all hurt too much.

And then I went numb, stood up, set the bottle on my nighstand, turned my light off and went to bed.

I fully expected to die that night.

But I woke up the next morning, groggy. At first I’d forgotten the night before, until my eyes caught sight of the pill bottle on my nightstand.

All I remember thinking was that I was such a failure I couldn’t even kill myself correctly.

I got up, nearly keeled over because my stomach hurt desperately, and got ready for school.

My stomach ached the entire day as a reminder of what I’d failed to accomplish. I went to the bathroom in every class to cry. When I got home, I sat in the livingroom. And then when my parents got home, I hid in my room.

I never told anybody that I’d tried to kill myself, and nobody ever found out. I just continued on as if it never happened. Clearly I wasn’t that sick if nobody noticed that I had been to the brink of death.

Even now I hurt – and I’m nearing 21.

Nobody knows what I’ve done to myself. Nobody knows that my thighs are lined with scars that will never fade. Or that I’ve tried to kill myself three times – the second and third nowhere near as serious as the first. I have trichotillomania. I pick my skin. I hit myself. When I accidentally get a bruise, I punch at it, revel in the pain that swarms for a few brief seconds, and then repeat. I end up with bruises that I easily talk away.

I feel like I’m stuck on autopilot when I’m around other people. I can’t control myself, and am stuck in the character I’ve been since I was in ninth grade. I don’t know who I am anymore.

I can’t even cut. I hurt so much, but I have no desire to cut myself. I just want to hurt myself.

I still want to die.

And nobody knows – and if they do, they don’t care.