***

***

Years ago, as an anxious angsty teen, I cut myself when things hurt.

I could say I don’t know how it began, because that’s easier than explaining the slightly long-winded truth; but that would, of course, be a lie- I remember how it started. The same way most of the things in life that end up being a really big do… as a little thing, just a stitch in time. An event that would have been forgotten had it not gained weight and strength, and bloomed; and eventually become part of who I am.

There was some strange kind of fashion amongst teenage girls, fifteen or so years ago, that was morbid and, albeit confronting and twisted, somewhat romantic. Whether it’s something teenage girls still do, I have no idea– for someone who once considered themselves so cool even the cool people didn’t get her, I am now an aging hippy who still listens to Triple J and gets excited at the thought of classic Tool albums being on iTunes.

Once upon a time, where I went to high school, if you had a boyfriend you were devoted to, you showed that by carving his initials into your skin.

I’m not going to say it was every girl who did this– most of the horse–riding, flute–playing Pollyannas most certainly did not.. But the girls like me– the darklings who didn’t quite fit in anyway– it was a status symbol, a way of showing you were owned. A mark to say you we’re good enough for someone to love you.

It started like that… “CL”.

And from there it became a habit that spasmed and grew, and I’m not entirely sure when it dug itself right into the base of my psyche… but it did.

It wasn’t immediate, discovering without even meaning to, without even realizing it, that self–inflicted pain had the ability to make all those other hurts fade away, dull and become insignificant. Just for a moment or two.. just for a little bit.

But I know it didn’t take long, not long at all. I carved those first two letters, wincing at the pain and only scraping through the top few layers of skin with the blunt edge of a tiny screwdriver, a tool that became a part of the ritual of hurting myself, of leeching emotional pain out via blood. And after I carved those first two letters, I began to add to them. Tiny words, a few millimeters high, carved and cut into the delicate skin on the back of left hand, being right handed as I was. A collage of single syllable observations that freckled my skin from just where my fingers branched out to the bracelet of wrinkles that signals the border between hand and arm. “Love”. “Hate”. “Pain”. “Life”. “Real”. “Sin”. “Want”. “Die”.

For a while, I wore those words like jewelry, akin to the tattoos and piercings I decorate my skin with now. They formed tiny scabs that I delicately removed, attempting to remove them as entire emotions, letters linked together. I took time doing them, lolling away Maths and English classes completely absorbed in forming words from blood- working hard at internalizing the pain, dripping a slow sheet of ice over my features so even the deepest cuts could not force me to wince.

IS it any surprise that, at the same time, I was in the midst of my first ever love affair…? I was losing all my self esteem for the first time over.

I can say ’I don’t know’ in reverence to this next sentence and mean it as truth. I don’t know exactly how it escalated. I don’t know when hurting myself went from a silly game to being potentially quite dangerous.

I don’t know when it was I discovered that I had developed an overwhelmingly scary habit of hurting myself every day… and no one was paying any attention.

But I do know, it happened quickly. That the words on my hands quickly, so quickly, became not enough, not deep enough… they didn’t hurt enough. A matter of simple biology– my pain threshold had increased. My mum, recently divorced and attempting to keep life together in a way I now understand more keenly than I ever would have wanted to, was distant and had little idea how to handle her depressed, hurting fifteen year old daughter. What could she do with an insecure teenager who felt as though she were screaming in constant pain but unable to force out a single keening sound? Who was mired in the flying, burning depths of a relationship that had somehow hit the depths of emotional manipulation in a way that was nearly impossible for two people who were still essentially children to understand?

This was life, untethered. I think maybe that’s what happens when you go off, headstrong and romantic and confident, rattling around the extended world too early, showing off your heart that’s too far down your sleeve. The real world… it eats you alive.

The simple innocence of words on my hand slowly crept and trailed themselves down my arm; where they morphed into slashes. Slashes that were deep and red, that bled thick ruby rivulets of myself that fascinated me as I soaked them with stark white tissues, watching as bright poppies of plasma bloomed through the acid ebb of the pain. It was ritualistic and addictive. When things hurt, when I felt like shit, I would take a short sharp paring knife, white handle with blue willow print, that I had pilfered at some point from my mother’s knife drawer; and remove it reverently from it’s hiding place. I would sharpen it with the heavy grey whet stone I had stolen from the same kitchen drawer.  I would press Play on some music, something poignant and grotty… and then I would cut.

Deep breath in. Push the pointed tip of the knife into my skin until there is a tiny bead of blood. Turn the knife just slightly so the blood seeps upward and coats the blade.

Then push down, hard and straight into the skin. If you’ve sharpened it enough, the knife will slice into your flesh, past years of sun–sprinkled freckles, the very moment you put enough pressure on. You will feel your skin split, and the pain will bloom the same way the blood does. And that’s the point that smooth, cultured sheet of ice is required– bring it on with a deep breath, close your eyes just slightly and hold, hold everything, feel the entire universe pause as you soak yourself with pain.

Breath out. Let the pain, and the urge to sob or cry out leave with it.
Dead breath, oxygen depleted. Breath it out, grey and void.

And after that, after that first cut is done and your flesh bleeding and bruised… you just slice. Drag the knife across your skin, that ice barrier staid and static, controlled and concealing. Smile just slightly, almost sickly, just the very edges of your lips curling upward. Then watch the blood run, watch it pool and drip, bright red and reflective and rich with life.

Soak up that life, seep it onto pure white tissue. Again and again, until you have a small, crumpled pile.. a tiny snowdrift spotted with infinite murders.

Dress your wounds, should they need it. Pull on a shirt with long sleeves, even in the warmest of weather. Always, always keep the facade of ice in place.. you never know when you may need it. And get on with your day. (Not that the day of a teenager seems to entail much, I comparison with now. But there is no reality, only perspective– and perspective tells me, being a teenage girl was a bitch).

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen what we used to call a ’smiley’. It’s a burn inflicted with a heated, upturned disposable cigarette lighter. Years before the introduction of the metal safety guard on lighters that prevented tiny thumbs– often including my own– from flicking the roller against the flint, it was another one of those strangest of body arts. The head of the lighter, two bluntly serrated rollers, combined with the metal rim at the far side, applied hot and with a certain amount of determined pressure; would leave an imprint in the skin that, if done correctly, looked somewhat (morbidly) like a smiling face.

Writing that out, know, as an adult, I’m horrified– it sounds so macabre and barbaric. It was macabre and barbaric. It didn’t seem that way, then. Although it was, understandably, even more confronting than cutting my skin. And it generally wasn’t something girls did-that kind of depravity was reserved for the same boys who pulled wings off fly’s and were just killing time until the end of Year Ten when they could legally drop out of school and officially do Nothing for a living.

But burning myself was a step up from cutting myself– it hurt more. It left scars that were far more interesting. Cutting myself, the pain of it… It had reached a point, as all addictions and habits do, where it just wasn’t enough any more. It felt like a craving for something deeper– searing metal on tender nerve endings is a whole different kind of pain. It was far more difficult not to flinch from that kind of heat, to cover that agony with ice… it was so much more of a twisted, senseless, exquisitely painful achievement.

Six months, from memory, all that went on for. Six months of blood and burning and blisters and making only the vaguest attempts at hiding it from people– after all, what good is a cry for attention if no one else sees it but you? But it seemed as though all that metaphorical crying, screaming… it did no good. No one knew how to help me, and, to be honest, I cannot remember what it would have taken, what would have been classified as ‘helping’. Love, maybe. Lots of it. (The very same thing I need now…) My mum tried her hardest, I remember that– but I was vaguely impenetrable. I vaguely remember offers of appointments with counseling services that were too difficult to obtain and too far off to be of any benefit to a teenager whose synapses just couldn’t frame a proper picture of the future in her head.

Sometimes I wonder exactly how relevant this fact is to the rest of this story, how intertwined the two are. It may mean nothing at all. It may be an consequential key to the frame of mind I was in. Either way, it seems relevant to note- I’d just a few months before started taking the contraceptive Pill. Hand in hand, I’d just fallen into my first real, unyielding, all consuming bout of dark depression.

Whatever the reasons, complex or simple- I felt like flat, paper thin, dessicated, alone and adrift, almost all the time. It’s natural to crave and seek an endorphin rush, it’s just human nature… unfortunately, the only rush I could manifest came from the push of the knife into my skin, or the sear of a heated lighted making my flesh bubble.

As a teenager, there was no sense of ‘this too shall pass’, of the future being just that and the present passing quickly. It was, possibly, the most mindful I’ve ever been in my life… the only issue was, I felt awful, all the time. And that’s not really a great thing to be mindful of.

It’s difficult to remember, looking back a it, exactly what it was like. It was pain, all the time. It was wanting something desperately and not knowing what it was. It was hating myself so much, feeling so insignificant that bloodshed- a primal indicator of distress- seemed an appropriate becaon of my distress of on a daily basis.

It was crying tears of blood, tears with substance; because nobody saw the salt ones. Real tears are clear like glass and people look straight through them… blood is never so easy to ignore.

I look back at what happened then, at how disconnected I was from myself, from my mother, and I wonder if that was me, reacting to my parent’s divorce, or her? Or just both of us, combined with life unpleasant? I carry the guilt now of how much all this must have hurt her, how helpless she must have felt. I hope she knows– I think she does– that none of it was her fault, and that she did everything she could. That I know she did what she could with what she had, and I love and respect her dearly for it.

In the same way I have only the fuzziest memories of how all this began, I can only vaguely remember how it ended. I moved, changed schools, left a mother and brother to move in with my dad– that’s a guilt I can still carry now, when I choose, one that only increases the longer I am a mother myself. The new house I found myself living in, without a bedroom of my own, lacked the privacy with which to indulge in angst. A grandmother with an insistent verbal mantra of ‘You are beautiful, you are clever, you are funny’ helped immensely, as the did the wardrobe of new clothes she bought for me. Attending school without the bullies I’d grown accustomed to, working a part time job and earning money of my own… all those things built my self esteem like tiny bricks, stacking their tiny increments up against each other to form a wall that was more solid than what I’d known before. Put those elements together with suddenly being sixteen years old, rather than fifteen- birthdays are funny things– and finally seeing some future beyond the next few months; and, without my even really being aware, life became a better place to be. I remember feeling the urge to hurt myself, more than once, in the six months or so after I moved to that new house. But instead of feeling dark and fraught and pensive, I just felt stupid. ‘Maturity’, a psychologist has named that feeling in the years since. Maturity, being able to see that cutting ones self to pieces as an outlet for one’s emotional pain is not at all se
nsible, not eve close to being socially acceptable.

And yet the urge remains.

Many people who are ‘cutters’ will attest to it becoming an addiction of sorts, an impulse that stays with them for life. Most activities that release a rush of endorphins into the system are essentially addictive- we judge their suitability by the potential damage they do to us psychically and emotionally.

Cutting yourself, obviously, it damages both. It becomes an instant release -for any time you feel your emotions are not validated, your words are not heard.

If no one will see the pain inside, it can be worn on the outside instead.

For years, any deep emotional pain that involved interactions with other people, people visible and tangible, almost always resulted in me wanting– craving– that feel of a knife on my skin, the rush of pleasant hormones that accompanied the blood. The only exception to that rule was when Tony died– I remember my psych asking me, early on in the After, did I want to cut myself, to hurt myself? Try ice cubes, she suggested, pushing them into your skin hard, or perhaps a rubber band around your wrist so you can flick it if the urge to hurt yourself begins to take over. And I remember staring at her, my disbelief causing me to miss a beat before I corrected her. No… it was OK. I was not OK… but I wasn’t going to cut myself. That wasn’t nearly enough, not even nearly intense enough to dilute this emotional pain.

And the dilution of pain was half the point.

It’s only been lately, as the deepest of this particular begins to wear off and I start to feel something like myself again, that the urge to slice my own skin has returned. It happens whenever someone is leaving me, whenever someone I love goes away. Or even when I just think they might be– even the smallest abandonment feels as though the world is ending, as though the sky is falling in all over again.

The scars stayed with me for far longer than I would have liked– I could read tiny words on my hand for a year or so, and feel bumpy scar tissue along my left forearm (always my left forearm– attempt to cut me anywhere else and I would scream, cry, unable to conjure that sheet of ice that was necessary to hide what I was feeling… The nerve endings in that particular patch of skin so very used to being abused they take it with minimal complaint). Even now, fifteen years later, I have one scar that remains. It looks like a small white pock mark half way up my arm. I doubt you’d ever know it was once a huge, infected burn blister, the result of heated steel held on flesh so long I smelt my own skin burning sweetness and it nearly made me sick.

It’s been years since I cut myself, burned myself. Now, as some kind of responsible adult, when things get really intense I generally get something pierced, or I work my way up to a new tattoo. If all else fails I’ve been known to turn to felt tip markers and pens, drawing the pattern for slices I cannot make. On my left forearm, of course. The urge to do cut myself still centers itself there. So that is where I draw.

It must be that maturity kicking in, or something… but I don’t cut myself anymore, and I rarely feel the need to. I’m thirty one years old with a Real Life and two kidlets of my own– cutting myself feels far too very much emo teenager. And I was ‘emo’ even before the word ‘emo’ was invented. (I told you– so cool, others hadn’t even caught up to my cool yet. Or something.)

But sometimes I look back at that teenage girl– a different one again from the Lori I am now, or the Lori I was in the Before– and I feel so sorry for her I could weep. I want to tell her, it’s going to be OK… we are going to be OK.

I want to be sure I’m not lying to her.

***

That electricity, that feeling of things building up… it was all through the air, running through it so thick it may have as well have been colored, in the weeks leading up to Tony’s death. At first I thought it was just the excitement of small children and Christmas, maybe looking forward to the pumping hedonism of New Years’ Ever, but those things came and went, and that electricity remained. The palatable feeling that something, something big, was about to happen. That a storm was gathering and it would break soon.

I wasn’t the only one who felt it. I know other people did too, and in hindsight it seems so easy for them to say that they know. But only my mother and my mate Emma, they were the only ones brave enough to verbalise it. Emma, bloody optimist that she is- and I adore that about her- she thought it was the lead up to something great. I was never so sure. It seemed to be all about death, a looming shadow of something.

“Don’t you remember? I didn’t think you would, and I didn’t want to mention it till now. But it was all I could think about after Tony died- you knew. Remember? You said to me, when you left my house, just days before it all happened, you said ‘If I die tonight, update my blog for me- tell people it was the little ghost girl who haunts the mountain that made me crash!’. We were so close…”

After she tells me, I do remember, that one sentence, making fun of an old local rumor, said completely in jest just ten months ago by a different person, a different Lori. Maybe we were close… not close enough.

But maybe it was better that way.

This isn’t the first time I’ve told this story. I tell it over and over again on my blog and then I tell bits of it over again on other people’s. But then healing is a funny process. It doesn’t just start one day and end another day at a full stop. Healing happens in the telling and in the feeling of the pain and every time it is, hopefully, that little bit less.

When Lori blogged through the time of her tragedy, when she wrote of her grief, her rage, her confusion – I cried. I cried for her. I also cried for me.

You see, I lost my husband, too.

No, he didn’t die. In fact, part of me feels that it is highly inappropriate to compare my story to Lori’s, but I did. And I do.

The man I loved, the man I married, the man I had children with, turned out to be a construct of my insecurities and his parasitic manipulation. He was a non-person, a sociopath.

When I found out, my husband was no more.

I lost everything. My whole life with him had been a lie. Every bit of joy, happiness, love, was one-sided and based on lies.

My falling apart took months. My life unravelled strand by strand, as I learnt more and more about the unthinkable lies that I’d been told.

The only real things in our relationship were my feelings. Everything he had ever said, everything he ever did was based on his need to manipulate me, to extract a particular reaction, a feeling, a verbal response.

But I don’t want to write about what he did. You can read about it here.

I want to tell you about how I felt. I want to tell you about the pit that I kept falling through in those long months. I felt I was going insane. I felt that nothing was real. I could no longer believe anything anyone told me, anything I saw, anything that happened.

We are frequently told that no one can make us feel or do anything, that it is all our choice. Well, there is an exception to that. Once you fall into the clutches of a narcissistic psychopath (by choice), you are no longer in control. Your sense of self disappears and you become his construct.

As I slowly unravelled myself from the suffocating threads of his lies and deceptions, I became so ashamed that I wanted the earth to swallow me up. I was ashamed that I let anyone do this to me. I was ashamed to be associated with someone like that. I was ashamed that I allowed myself to love someone like that. I was ashamed that I bore his children. That I allowed anyone like to even touch me, let alone share the intimacies that we shared.

I was angry. So angry! I was furious (and still am) at the betrayal of my trust, of my children’s trust, the way he used me – as a mere plaything, both emotionally and physically. That he hid who he was from me. That he had no regard for our marriage vows, that everything that we ever did together was just a game. That I had no idea who this person was! How dare he do this to me?? What sort of a person behaves like that?? How can anyone have absolutely no scruples??

I was angry at my mother in law and some of our friends who conspired with him. Those who knew and lied to me!!

I grieved (I still do). I grieved for what never was. For what was supposed to be. For myself. For believing every minute of my life with that man. I grieved for my life as a wife, as “whole” family of four. I grieved for the times we had spent together, on holidays, in our back yard, on adventures, with family. Times that will never again be repeated. Times that I wasn’t sure were even real.

I grieved that I had to sell my beautiful house and lose the garden that we had made together. I grieved that my children would lose the home and lifestyle they loved.

I cried with my children around me. We would huddle in a heap on the kitchen floor, as they would try to comfort me and sometimes they cried, too. I could not “make happy” and pretend all was well for their sakes. I could not conveniently schedule my breakdowns for when they weren’t there or when they were in bed.

I howled and screamed when I was alone. I wanted to pound my head into the kitchen floor, to punish myself for my stupidity and to replace the emotional pain with a physical one. For the first time, I understood some cultures’ traditions of self-mutilation in times of grief. I considered piercings and tattoos. All I managed was to pierce my ears again.

It may be insensitive for me to write here, on Lori’s blog, that I wish my ex was dead. Yet, I do. This not an uncommon sentiment among women who had been abused. Yes, what I experienced was psychological abuse on a massive scale, massive because it was so subtle, so insidious, so long. Massive because I was led to believe I was worthless and that the world would be better off without me.

Somehow, my mind believes that with his death, my shame would be erased. My grief would be justified and my betrayal avenged. Rationally, I know it’s not true.

I work daily on my healing, as does Lori. It may never be complete, but, like Lori, I don’t intend to give up.

Dorothy has been blogging for over four years at Singular Insanity. She blogs to keep herself sane, more or less, writing about sole parenting, mental health and starting over. A sole parent of two boys, Dorothy is also a freelance writer, speaker and chronic furniture re-arranger. You can also find her on Twitter and BookFace.

Last weekend, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I dressed my children in their party clothes and drove into the suburbs. We’re going to a party, I tell them. Like a birthday party, mum? Asks my son, all big blue eyes and excitement.

Kind of, I say. Sort of. A birthday, yes, but a sad one, because the birthday person isn’t here anymore. They’ve gone to Heaven.

I’ve become quite skilled at delicate, intricate explanations.

Last weekend my beautiful friend Kristie from Hespera’s Garden held a first birthday part in the memory of her baby boy, Avery, still born one year ago. A clear winters day filled with bright sunshine, in a pretty green park near their house. A gathering of friends and family and loved ones, adults and children. Lots of food and an amazing cake and, as Kristie herself put it, “a bit of ceremony. A bit of pomp. …the least I could for you.”

I’ve blogged before about the dignity Kristie holds herself with, the grace with which she grieves, and allows others the space and strength and respect to do the same. Again, at her son’s birthday, it was that contradiction that struck me, and the intense melancholy that comes with it. This woman, in her pain, is the epitome of beauty.

Kristie and I.

I watch Kristie stand with her daughter as the mouth the words of a literal Lullaby together, and I am in awe. Their pain– a mother for her child, a little girl for the big sister she isn’t yet and the baby she never got to show her room– seems to propel them together and bond them there, the simple sharing of it something powerful that brings them both solace and strength.

I gently compare that to my son and I and see the difference in the grain of the two relationships– where Kristie and her Dragonfly draw closer; my Chop and I seem to polarize, internalizing grief that would surely be healthier outside our heads, both terrified of showing each other we are hurting for fear of causing more pain.

And I know, I know– compare not, lest ye feel like a dick who always comes up short. But how many other grieving woman and mourning children do you meet in your day to day life…? Parenting can be a bitch. There’s about a hundred decisions to be made, each with a plethora of different options to be researched… and that’s just in your child’s first month. Then you come to the realisation that, unless they themselves are in the act of parenting small children right now, people either have no idea what’s going on, or have forgotten exactly how bullshit difficult and treacherous this mundane, everyday raining kids stuff can be. That’s when you begin to see the company of other parents as an invaluable asset. They will help you make those definitive choices between cradle and cot, solids a four months or solids at six months, toilet training now or waiting till summer… so on and so forth.

All those topics are (sadly) fundamental. But they’re also very, very common– everyone with little kids gets that stuff. But when you’re parenting kids who are grieving– and, to a much greater extent, kids with disabilities– there a questions you have that not many other parents deal with. Like– how you describe Heaven? What do you say when they ask if you’re going to die? Do you initiate conversation about the person who’s missing in your lives, or do you wait from to bring it up? How much regression is normal? And how in God’s name are you meant to deal with it when they get teased at school for being the only one of the ‘big boys’ who still likes ‘baby tv’?

Within all that come the comparisons. Only instead of what age they learn to crawl or tie their shoelaces, it’s the level of your child’s pain. How they express it. How often they cry. If they cry at all.

And how much you deal with all of it. Are you too disconnected, too involved, giving too much detail, not enough? Are you giving your child an adequate landscape with which to deal with such enormous, tremendous pain…?

Comparing your own parenting to others is natural, I think, to a point. It lets you challenge your own behaviors, learn new and different ways to approach things you may have completed avoided before. Of course, with shattered, decimated self esteem, it leads to beating yourself up no end.

But let’s focus on the positives.

I’ll be honest with you (and, in case you’re wondering, Kristie has read and OK’ed this post), in the Before I wouldn’t have even contemplated– not for a moment– taking my kids to a memorial service for… well… anyone, actually. They didn’t go to their fathers funeral or see him in the ICU– choices I made with solid, unyielding instinct and don’t regret. I only wonder trepidiously if my children, my son especially, will resent me for it, eventually.

So I watched with infinite understanding as the few people I casually informed as to where we going that weekend recoiled in horror. And then watched, with the same understanding, as they remembered… my children, like Kristie’s Dragonfly, are not exactly average anymore. They have this huge, sad, unfortunate and unfair understanding that where there is life, there is death.
With that in mind, I didn’t hesitate to accept the invite from Kristie. Nor did I shy, or not a lot at least, when I explained to my son and daughter where we are going and why.

The Bumpy Thing in party mode- I swear I brushed her hair before we left the house.

“It’s a party, like a birthday party”, I tell them. My daughter is too young for this– one mention of ‘party’ and she’s run, bandy legged and birds nest hair, to her bedroom to begin harvesting from an arr
ay of pink party frocks from her cupboard (which she will, of course, want to wear all at once). But my little man is, in his fashion, eager but earnest, and he becomes increasingly sincere and so heart–breakingly adult as the discussion continues.


“It’s a party for a little boy who has died. He’s in Heaven.”

The blue eyes grow wonder, some kind of wonderment at finding his familiar in every day banality shining through them, “Like my Daddy?”


“Yes baby, like your daddy. This little boy was named Avery, and it should have been his birthday this weekend. Now…” I pause, trying to lay this concept out in my mind just as flat as I can, in order to simplify it for such a tiny child’s understanding. “Remember when Daddy died and we we all very, very sad? But we are happy, sometimes, when we talk about Daddy, because we loved him very much and he made us happy, right?” Chop nods. Score one to Mum– so far, so good. “Well, this is a party for the happy things about Avery, because people were happy he was here. So it will mostly be happy. There’ll be other kids there to play with, too. But some people might be sad for a little bit, OK? Because they’re sad that Avery died. But it’s mostly a happy day. And…” again, I pause– where is the rule book for this? Where is the adult to weigh this up with, to help me view it from every facet and decide if I’m doing the right thing? “… Avery has a big sister. He name is Dragonfly.” Being at that testosterone-wielding age of four, this means little to the Chop– girls are, for the next eight years or so, totally boring. “She’s the same age as you. And she knows about Heaven, too.”

Again, that simple astonishment, and it bobs to the surface of my mind, one of those worries about my kids that I keep weighted, lest they send me into a screaming panic; how lonely this child must feel sometimes, with his sister just bit too young for the kind of conversation he needs, and his circumstances so different to the tiny selection of other children at his daycare.