NOTE: This is my personal story. Thoughts about antidepressants were from a slanted point of view of life at the time, and actually I’ve gained a little knowledge in how they actually help people. Trigger warning: this details pretty explicitly my first foray into self injury, as well as fragmented memories as they came about during this time of my life. I don’t appreciate glorifying suicide, and I intend to keep writing my experience on here as a hopeful path to something better than the urge to end it all. It’s disjointed, but it gets my point across how I want it to be.
In Vitro–2007
Ice crystals clawed up from the bottom of the large window, chill fog making tracers out of the street lamps that darted the landscape. Dangling lazily in my hands was a hunting knife I had received as a Christmas gift a few years before. The cold, bare blade rubbed long side against my upper arms, intense anticipation slowly whitening my knuckles.
Antidepressant Courage. Chemically Induced numbness shelling out tendrils against logic. Courage of a brain bathed in all purpose serotonin. Candy from the Wonka Factory Pill Mill that made life meaningless, caused anorgasmia–a mean trip that causes three hour masturbation sessions without orgasm. Fuck all, maybe it wasn’t numbness that created the courage, maybe it was the unbridled rage that seethed below the cool surface of depression and the drug.
Goddamn it–to feel the faint flutter of a rising heart beat!
From broad side to blade, a twitch of a wrist, the skin of my upper arm accepting the cool metal as part of the whole. It was a frozen burn at first. My eyes jumped with a shot of adrenaline. It was my first cut.
I drew the knife back, my breath turning shallow. At first, the frayed skin looked like an unzipped pocket that just led to more skin. Then the pay off; crimson seeped out like it was running away from my body. Blood dripped in tear drops down the remainder of my arm.
Atrophied axons went hot. The cyclical thoughts that strung together like a torn spider web flapping in the wind finally died down for a moment. The faulty machinery of the defunct contraption fired off without a hitch, and in the midst of the adrenaline rush, there was silent serenity. An off kilter world finally regained balance right on the tip of a fulcrum; I didn’t feel numb.
Hello. . .?
Little did I realize at the time that the head rush, an awful high that sat somewhere on the spectrum of junk being injected into a newly willing inhabitant for the Monster, had taken the form of addiction in cutting. After the initial slice, I wanted more–more of the essence that had so willingly danced on the air moments before. I needed the green light to come on in my brain again. . .again. . .again. . .
The DSM-V finally tackles the subject of cutting willingly, though the flimsy definitions go no further than self injury in pursuit of relieving psychological pain, or at the very least relieving the physical symptoms of clinical depression. Another DSM will probably have to come out to really flesh out the ritualistic tendencies of an addicted cutter.
“12 months.”
One of my best friends began to proclaim the number of months without cutting, like a twelve step program that would attempt to wipe away the addiction. I was her sponsor of sorts for the strange world that had opened up when skin had met blade. Of course, at that time, I had already beaten my own addiction to it.
Cutting.
Upon further research, there actually is a high that is sustained from cutting. Well, not sustained, rather a fleeting moment used to inject a moment of relief in the midst of psychotic depression, punctuating a bit of nuanced life into the zombiefied depression husk of an individual by means of endorphins. When injury occurs, the endorphins kick in for fight or flight response. It’s an alert system, letting the body know the most immediate threat. The endorphin high is actually prone to creating an addiction; it’s the same reason junkies are lost to barbiturates, amphetamines, etc., etc. Take your pick.
The only reason that my own addiction to cutting wore thin was because a very, very, very close friend of mine made me put her name on the blade. A cheap piece of paper wrapped around the blade with loose filaments of scotch tape. Every time the urge came back, I found myself staring at her name. Like AA members do for accountability, blue ink forced me to set the knife down every time. I became accountable to her.
However, once my ritual had ended, near the shoulders of my arms looked like hamburger. Night after night, release after release, I fed the Monster until it left a lasting mark on my body. To this day, over half a decade later, I still wear the scars on my arms.
Intimate relationships only helped to illuminate my own embarrassment. I would find myself unclothed, naked, about to make love, thinking I was protected by a near pitch black room. Palms would trail down my back, out over my shoulders, and the lover would stop when she found the ridges of my shame. Love making would pause, an explanation would ensue, and the moment would be lost. For the optimistic souls out there, eventually we would get back around to ‘it’.
At that point in my life, the circa 2007 mark, my first foray into cutting was only a few months into the worst depression I had ever known. Cutting was trouble, but things became real when I had gotten my hands on a pistol.
Bullet in chamber.
Cock it.
Safety off.
Cold metal on the center of my temple.
That moment was even more disassociated than the predicament I had found myself in with self injury. Everything about loading the gun, taking the proper steps to arm it, and putting it to my head was very nonchalant. There was no crying, no difficulty, just a tranquil serenity that kept whispering to me, “You don’t have to feel this way anymore.”
Sobriety jump started my reality when I felt the chill of the barrel, though. All kids out of the water; adult swim.
I remember the first moment that I had shown my injured arms to someone. Formerly a cutter herself (I seem to have a plethora of them in my life), an audible gasp escaped her lips when she witnessed what I had done. The depth of my depression had become apparent, and a dear friend of my circle of friends shot into her mind. Memories of another that looked like me, that cut like me, that took the forever plunge with a bullet that kept going into the hearts of Those Left Behind.
“If you’re going to kill yourself, you have to call me. I won’t try to stop you, but you have to call me so I am not taken off guard. I lost someone once without knowing, I want to know this time. You have to call me.”
That in between moment of the gun barrel to my head bread crumbed to her words, and though pulling the trigger was easy at that moment, calling her was not. I had made a promise, and I knew that I didn’t have the guts to tell her what was about to happen. Funny that a drunken conversation had saved my life.
With cutting no longer an option, and suicide taken away from me with a promise, accountability had come in to my intrusive thoughts with big muscles and a cape. All of the perpetuating thoughts were stopped by the simple acknowledgement that my actions would hurt the people I loved.
I put the pistol down calmly. Words trailed through my broken mind that hadn’t been apparent in months.
“I need help.”
Dimming rays of the dying sun cut puzzled shadows through the blinds, stretching across the bedroom floor in Technicolor slits. I sat staring as the shadows began to overtake the sunlight. My own darkness would not overtake me.