Dear Reader,
As someone who still struggles with self harm, I actually think that it is a very non-logical act that paradoxically arises from what can only be described as an instinctual urge (at least from my experience). No one told me to hurt myself, there was just this compulsion that bubbled up in the recesses of me - a dissatisfied frustration at how I’m doing, where I am, or who I am. It’s almost like someone held the survival instinct up against a dark mirror. It’s ugly doppelgänger rears its head along with an instinct to commit acts against your person contrary to one’s survival and health.
Wow. Okay. Things got dark there. Reeling it back it. On the 20th of September 2018, I had the pleasure of speaking to Ān. They have not self-harmed before but have had urges to do so on two distinct occasions in the past. They wanted to talk about their experience and process the reaction to the events that occurred.
Ān, Sep 2018
The following excerpts have been edited to flow in a single narrative. It is still Ān’s voice; they have vetted the following document and approved that they are being accurately represented.
Ān
As much as it is important to hear about people’s experiences with self-harm, I also think it’s important to talk about why people choose not to, or focus on what’s happening when they stop themselves from going through with it in the moment.
There was a time about three years ago, when I was in a bad place. I had just got out of an emotionally abusive relationship, and that was the first time I had ever thought of hurting myself. I remember feeling extremely guilty about the way things went down, even though now I can say that it wasn’t on me.
Late August 2018, the urge came back to me. I saw a lot of parallels between my state of mind then and three years ago, except it was more more escalated than before. I think it was caused by the realisation that I hadn’t accepted or processed a lot of things that happened during the abusive relationship. Recently I broke up with someone else and I wasn’t prepared when a lot of those emotions and memories came back. It was a lot of self-directed anger that came from expectations that I placed on myself: that I would be a lot further along on the recovery road so to speak, or getting past that event in life. After all, it was three years ago, and back then, I was my (fairly naive) high school self. I was going through a lot of self blame, and I didn’t know any other way to get out of that.
The main thing that stopped me from going through with it then.... hmmm, I remember sitting at my desk, and I saw like a thing on the suicide hotline website, and it said just to wait like maybe a minute or five minutes before you did anything. So I waited, and after a while, it just went away. I also did talk to my mom about it, I can’t remember if I told her about the self harm thing, but I did tell her I wanted to see a therapist. She told me to sit on it for two weeks. She was worried that it would go on my record, and that might affect my getting a job in the future. She’s been very supportive and has always had my interest at heart.
This time, I would say what stopped me from going through with it was the feeling that if I started something, I would only feel more ashamed and disappointed in myself than I already was. If I was going to be worse after that anyway, it wasn’t worth it. Most of all, I think I was afraid of myself, realising what I was capable of doing put me both in awe and horror. I felt I had all this excess energy inside me that I needed to get out somehow, but I still believed there were other ways of getting it out, so I just started exercising like I normally do. Maybe I wanted the burn you feel in your muscles to equal the pain I imagined I’d be going through if I self harmed. Somehow by exercising hard when I felt the urge, the feelings just went away.”
I would like to take a break in this recollection to unpack some of what has been written so far. First of all, I want to thank Ān for sharing their experiences. Involving your parents in your mental health issues can be challenging, and not everybody is in the social circumstance where that’s a viable option. Fortunately for Ān, they have people they can depend on and turn to for support.
Secondly, I don’t want anyone to think that Ān, or myself, believe you can just exercise mental health issues away. Everybody goes through different struggles. Everyone functions differently. They are in no way saying ‘exercise fixed me and it should fix you.’ Something that has infuriated me is the fallacy that people who self harm or have clinical depression are ‘just not trying hard enough.’ We, as a society, seem to be capable of affording sympathy toward an infliction of any part of the body except the brain, and that has to change.
Lastly, I would like to address the frustration that arises from self-imposed expectations. Having expectations is not harmful in and of itself; they can be a healthy way of improving yourself. What Ān said really resonated with me because that frustration of believing you were past something, only to have it come back and emotionally cripple you later is so familiar to me. And it spirals too - ‘What? You’re still not over this? It happened three years ago, how can this still be an issue.’ - which leads you to beat yourself up more. It’s almost like circumstances and your expectations form a tag team in the beating up of your mental person. While it’s healthy to set goals on self recovery, saying ‘you really should be further along than this’ does nothing to actually help you get further along. Be patient with yourself. Everyone recovers from and processes events differently. It’s something everyone has to learn. When you don’t meet expectations or you re-lapse, accept the reality of the situation, and go from there. Easier said than done I know, but hopefully like Ān, you have someone you can turn to that understands you and can support you through it. Remember, it’s not weakness to seek professional help.
Going back to Ān, I wanted to talk with them about with their practice of tattooing their body through ‘stick and poke’ and saw some parallels between that and self harm, so I asked them to walk me through that process.
Ān
I’m pretty sure I did my first one in October of last year. My friends were doing it. The first time I just watched them; the second time I wanted to try it for myself.
Some of the tattoos were part of this project I was working on, and it (the connection between tattooing themself and self harm) was actually something my professor pointed out. It definitely wasn’t something I was thinking about at the time and while I see the connection now, I definitely disagreed with her back then. The project works with a lot of sad and heavy themes. It was about putting what I felt - sadness and frustration - into my skin. Tattooing myself partly had to do with making it visible, and that somehow brought me some comfort. I mean... the pain is a part of the the process, but the desire comes from a very different place from when I wanted to self harm. It comes from the place of wanting to create and express, rather than punish.
I felt that it was important that I didn’t map out the tattoos before doing it. This one is how my Grandma would write my Chinese name - she was actually my Grandmother’s friend - but she became my grandmother when she died. Since I never use that name and I never learned Chinese until this year, I wanted to see my handwriting as it was, and not a copy from a standard form.
This one is an aerial view of the province in China where I’m from, or at least the area I guess I’m from. I opened it up on google maps, and I remember trying to zoom in far enough for me to see the people there. It was around this area that the police found me at a train station and brought me to the orphanage (a normal procedure at the time). It’s hard for me to imagine that people are still living their normal lives there, even after I left. Like they didn’t just stop. It makes sense of course, that things would continue on. Through tattooing I worked through a lot of emotions about where I’m from and the events that brought me here.
I wanted to talk about my near self-harm experiences because it’s something I want to understand better. I want to understand myself better. At the moment I’m doing pretty well, but if something happened and I felt that way again, at least I would be more prepared for it.
That’s all I have for you today; thank you for reading. Recognise and working on areas of self-improvement is important, but be patient with yourself through that process.