Psyke.org

Newts

My Story

Copyright, Newts

Thinking back I cannot remember what age I started self harming. I know it was around thirteen or fourteen though. I had always been the kid no one liked really. I had a good group of mates and everything but people didn’t really take to me. I remember I had heard a lot about self harm when I was in school and when I was thirteen I started to be mentally bullied by five girls who were a year younger than me. For a few months it was bearable but then it got to the point where I would not walk down the corridor on my own and developed an obsessive compulsive disorder briefly as I always thought something was on my back so would constantly be asking people to check my back. At least two hundred times a day. Then the bullying got worse and I really wanted to get back at the bullies so sat on my bed thinking how can I get back at them how can I hurt them like they hurt me then it came to me. I will cut myself that will get back at them. So I did. And from that moment I was hooked. I don’t know what changed inside me but something just gave me a great release and I felt free from everything. My head was spinning and I felt calm for the first time.

After that the bullying got worse so I started drinking compulsively and cutting a lot and the drinking got me in a lot of trouble when I was fourteen or fifteen as I got drunk and sexually assaulted by a boy who was older than me so my self harm became even worse. I never told anyone he assaulted me I was too ashamed. I never told anyone about my self harm until he did that to me. It became a regular thing until I met my boyfriend when I was just fifteen. He made me stop harming because he said he would end things with me if I carried on so I stopped, but when that relationship ended the first thing I did was cut and I am ashamed to say as soon as I cut I realised how much I had missed my escape method it felt good to be alive again to know that I wasn’t just a walking body but to see I was alive. After I ended it with my boyfriend he turned to drugs saying that it was all my fault and I remember sitting in the school field with him and he walked off saying that he was going to kill himself and all I could do was sit there and cry, about two weeks after I ended it with him I met someone else I realise now it was just rebound but my ex was furious rightly so I see now but he kept saying how horrible I was but then I found out he had been sort of seeing someone behind my back, rumours but I still don’t know if they are true, but when I found out I swallowed a needle. That’s the most extreme I’ve ever done. When I got together with my new boyfriend things were good and I told him about my cutting. He wasn’t happy but he accepted it, things were going well but we did have our ups and downs, then I fell in love with my best mate who had a girlfriend he had loved me years before and he said he still loved me. We slept together three times and I had never been so happy. He was big on his drugs and after the last time he said if he wasn’t so drugged up it would never have happened that killed me I cut all over my body after that and started to burn my arms, at one point I held my head under hot water I just wanted to feel pain. We still sort of remain friends but at the end of the day I had a boyfriend and wanted to feel safe with him, things started to go bad one night when we came home after a night out we argued and I went to bed when I woke my boyfriend was on top of me raping me. He stopped when I freaked out and he said he never realised I was asleep. Bullshit, I snore! I stayed with him though for some reason. The next day I rang my best mate and asked him to pick me up and told him what had happened and my best friend said ‘well you are his property’. After that moment I have never felt any respect for him at all. From that moment I wanted to die I locked myself into my room and took some painkillers and drank a bottle of vodka and threw up everywhere I had only taken about four painkillers I wasn’t sure if I wanted to die, then one night everything got on top of me and I was in the bathroom and picked up a blade, I pressed really hard on my wrist and started to drag it down. And my boyfriend walked in and I froze. He cleaned up my wrist I hate him for that I really wanted to die. When I was eighteen I started to get vivid flashbacks about my childhood. Everyone has always found it hard when I talk about me as a kid because there is so much I don’t remember at all which upsets my parents a lot as they think I hated growing up. But these flashbacks were of my childminder’s daughter sexually abusing me. Every time I see her I would always get this panicked feeling and I never knew why but all she had to do was hug me and I would freeze. Ever since I was a kid I can remember doing that and now I knew why. I had all these memories coming back to me and I couldn’t cope so I cut my legs and my arms. Now I can’t even look at my legs without crying. Now I have just come out of a two year relationship and am still cutting, my ex found someone else after four days and I still can’t believe what he did. I have lost two friends through self harm and I really do want to stop. But the truth is I can’t. And if I did I would go back to it.

 

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