Kathryn

My name is Kathryn, and I am thirteen years old. I started the long road through depression about eight months ago when I was just starting school this year. I remember that I hated being in a new school with new faces, new teachers, and a new life. I hated my school so much that I would sit in class on the verge of tears with memories from my older school, because here, I had no friends. No one to be with. No one to talk to. I would sit and class and just play with the compass, ruler, and calculator I kept in my notebook for math class, until one time, I accidently poked myself with the sharp end of the compass. That was the beginning of my problems.

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The pain. The pain that I have inside leads to cuts, the cuts lead to scars, the scars lead to questions and blinkless stares, the pain inside becomes unbearable.

Kendra

Kae

The door to the girl’s bathroom is heavy. She pushes it open slowly, taking care not show the agitation burning in her veins. She steps into the bathroom. The grey walls sport irregular patterns of large white squares; the B.O.T’s hasty solution to hiding last terms graffiti. The row of basins beneath the stained mirror are littered with chip packets, discarded lunches and puddles of murky water. The entire bathroom smells of a foul combination of paint, shit, cigarette smoke and cleaner. She ignores the state of the empty bathroom and walks into a cubicle.

The inside walls of the tiny cubicle are a festival of penned graffiti. The sanitary bin is foully stained and nearly overflowing. The toilet itself is in dire need of cleaning; the black plastic seat is cracked and rough, and the cistern has long since lost its whiteness. Cigarette ash fills every crack and crevice.

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Katie

The cuts are healing. I guess it is time to make more. There’s a lot of talk about punishment and not deserving to be okay on the inside. I guess that is a fairly common trait among us who self injure. Where does it come from? Is it our abusers who have taught us it is our fault and therefore deserve to be punished? Is it our inappropriate guilt feelings? Our drive for perfection? Our need to feel something? Our pain for what was done to us? I think the answer lies in all of the above. Is this what I should be pondering on my birthday? No, but here we are anyway. 9:30 a.m. is a bad time to be thinking these thoughts. It means we must fight them all day and into the night until we can cut. Alone. Secretly, in our shame and guilt to live another day. Is this any way to run a life? No. But it is all that we have at the moment. Endless days and nights of cutting, regretting and feeling shame.

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Kim

I’m being called names at school like stinky, smelly, b.o and all that kind of stuff, but I don’t know why. I had a shower every morning but that soon changed. They keept saying it, loads of the kids in school. Then I kept getting my mum to buy me 5 cans of deoderant, as much as I could. My school bag was full of cans and my mum stopped buying me loads of them. But by this time I think I was paranoid. I had 3 baths every day. I had to stay up really late to do my home work. Then I liked a boy who hated me and people were saying he says I smell too. I was being punched, kicked, pushed, tripped up. When my mum found out about all the baths I was having she told me to just have one because you don’t smell. Some of my mates had enough because I was spraying myself all the time even in class and always at break and lunch.

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