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Lacey

Please, Just Listen

Copyright, Lacey

My name is Lacey. I have been cutting for seven years. It started when I was in the 3rd grade. I’d just do small ones but last Christmas I tried to kill myself. I took 38 pills and tried to sleep. Me and my family weren’t getting along. So that’s why I did it. I seem to never do the right things. My whole family has problems. Sometimes I feel like I should try and kill myself again. But always the thing that goes in my head right before I take a pill, is what made me tell my dad that I had taken the pills. He told me he loved me and that he always would. I don’t want to have pain in my life, that’s all I have ever had. I don’t want things to change. I know I must sound really stupid but I just need to get it off my chest. People say they love me but I don’t feel like they do. My mom looks at my cuts and sometimes kisses them. I love my family but I think they would be happy without me. And same with my friends. My best friend’s a cutter too. She’s a lot badder than me though. I love her very much, but I think she would be happier with someone different. I lie to people to make them happy. I don’t tell anyone anything about what I truly feel. I don’t want people to look at me and think I’m stupid. I still cut and I know I shouldn’t. I’m going into high school and all I would was to be a little happy. but if you would like to talk to me more, my e-mail is purplefairy694@hotmail.com. Thanks for reading.

My Story

Copyright, Lacey

Everyone starts their stories off really poetically but I’m not going to. I am a self-injurer, a cutter they said. My best friend is too. I started scratching my arms with things when I was an eighth grader so I think I was thirteen. In the middle of 8th grade I tried committing suicide. I had lost my boyfriend because my best friend had cheated on her boyfriend with mine. I couldn’t trust my best friend anymore either, and my grandma was sick. She couldn’t remember names or faces anymore. I felt really useless and decided that if I wasn’t doing any good why was I here. I somehow ended up stopping for my freshman year of high school. I think that going to church six days a week really helped. But then at the beginning of this year, my best friend (the same one who took my boyfriend) and I got jobs at our local skating rink. There was constant drama. My best friend had been dating my ex boyfriend for around a year, but she liked a coworker of ours. So I told her she should break up with him and go after this new guy. I don’t really know if I had her best interests at heart. So she broke up with him and the day after the new guy got back together with his ex. Later, he cheated on his girlfriend with my friend. I blamed myself for what had happened because if it weren’t for me my friend wouldn’t have ever gotten the job there. So I started to try and kill myself. I would take large amounts of aspirin and crystallised salt. The salt would dehydrate me and my temp would go up but the temp I felt would go down. My friend was heartbroken. After about four months it really started to get to her that she ruined her best relationship, she knew that I used to scratch and at one point I had also cut. She started asking me a lot of questions like how did I do it, where, and what did I use. I never thought that she would start it either, but she did. She was depressed and had constant suicidal thoughts. Her psychologist decided that she needed to be placed in a behavioural health centre. When I found out what she had been doing I knew that somehow I had sort of helped. Once she got out of the clinic she would still do it. So I started to do it too. I would take a blade and run it across my skin. All the old feelings came back. Then one day we had a huge fight. A while later when we talked it out she showed me her arm, and on both sides she had deep scars. All I could do was gasp. A few days after that my childhood best friend’s dad killed himself. When I was growing up I basically lived at their house so he was kind of like a father to me. I didn’t go to the funeral and I didn’t cope with it. I still haven’t. A few days ago, I was in a fight with my parents and my dad grabbed my arm and threw me into my room. The next morning when I woke up I had a huge fingerprint on my arm. I didn’t want to deal with that either so I got out an old metal protractor and pressed it hard against my skin. That’s what I’ve been doing since the fight. Last night I was in tears because I don’t want to do this anymore, but I can’t stop. I hope one day I will be able to. And I congratulate all of you that have. Because it isn’t easy.

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Copyright, Lacey

The first time I can remember hurting myself was in year nine. I was thirteen or fourteen. I had heard about people cutting themselves but never really thought too deeply into it. The year before I had heard that this girl Mary had tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists. In year nine I became friends with her. We started talking about trivial things like the music we liked and the TV shows that we liked.

Later that year I had a bad time with friends. I thought that everyone was talking about me behind my back and I was convinced nobody liked me. One day after school I was really upset and I thought about trying to forget the emotional pain so I decided to hurt myself. I didn’t think of using a knife or anything, I just used a very blunt plastic saw type thing, I don’t even remember what it was. I didn’t draw blood at all. I just ended up rubbing the skin off a few layers. When my mum saw it, I just said that I fell out of a tree.

I never thought to do it again until the year later. I was at Mary’s birthday party (we were now very good friends) and I felt like everyone was ignoring me and talking about me behind my back. I went and sat in her room for a while, her boyfriend and one of his friends were sitting on her bed talking, and they didn’t even acknowledge me. I looked at the floor and noticed she had a broken mirror on the floor. I picked up one of the pieces and dragged it across my hand three times. I felt immediate relief. When my sister and my cousin asked me what happened, I just said that I put my hand in a rose bush.

I don’t remember doing it again until this year. One of my friends told me about getting blades from the razors you shave your legs with. I rummaged around my cupboard one day and found a new razor. I ran a bath and got in. I got the blade out of the plastic razor and sat there looking at it for a while. I didn’t want anyone to see the cuts, so I decided the best place to do it was on my leg. I think I did about twenty cuts in total. I don’t know why I did it. It just made me feel real. Alive. After that I would have a bath every now and then and cut my legs.

I remember the first time I cut my arm. It was on my upper forearm. I was so sad that I just started cutting and I found it hard to stop. I did about thirty cuts that time. I think that was the first time that I realised I needed help. Every time I did it, the cuts would get lower and lower. Even in the heat, I had to wear long sleeves. My family are not the people to understand things like self-harm.

The last seven months have been the hardest. I would cut myself almost every day. I used to get to school in the morning and go into the toilets and go into the second last cubicle on the left. I’d sit down on the toilet and cut myself. This went on for a few weeks. It got to the stage where I couldn’t get through the day without seeing blood. For about a week I did it twice a day. I’ve got cuts over old scars.

The worst part of it has been the last three weeks. I started collecting painkillers to overdose on. I had fifty-eight pills in total. I ended up giving them to a friend of mine that was very worried about me and she has helped me through a lot of things. One Friday night I just broke down. With my friend’s help, I told my mother what was going on. It was the hardest thing that I have ever had to do. I am now seeing a psychologist, I’m on anti-depressants and I have been getting help from my family. They still don’t understand self-harm. I’m not better than I was, I’m still cutting and I still sometimes think about suicide but I am getting help.

 

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