Psyke.org

Virginia

It Was Intriguing…

Copyright, Virginia

My name’s Virginia. I’m thirteen and I started getting involved with self-injury when I was eleven or twelve. It’s hard for me to remember dates and things like that, but I remember the first time I tried to cut myself. My grand-parents had bought me a microscope slash biology set for my birthday, and inside there was a scalpel, a knife and many different needles. I got angry one day, angry at every living thing, every bad memory, every tear spilt, every secret I’d ever kept. And I remembered a girl in 7th grade I had known a year back who had been sent to the hospital after the teacher had seen her cut her best friend’s name into her arm with a compas. We didn’t see her until about five months later. It intrigued me why people did that.

I looked up to them: they were strong and they weren’t affraid of pain like everybody else. I wanted to be one of those people. I thought it was cool for people to make themselves bleed like that. I liked blood. A lot more than what was normal, if it was at all normal. And one day I told myself I’d have to try. And that day when I got angry at the whole world, I lay my eyes on the scalpel in my biology set. I picked it up and stared at it for a long time. I was so foolish to believe that I could die if I did this to myself. That I could bleed to death from my first cut. I was really stupid back then. And so I cut. I applied pressure on the handle so the blade of the scalpel would dig into my skin and I pulled the object slowly towards me. It didn’t bleed. What the hell. It didn’t bleed. So I tried again. Didn’t bleed. And again and again until I realised it wouldn’t bleed. I then put the scalpel down, turned the radio on and got ready for another sleepless night. Things were hard at the time, and sleep wasn’t important.

Like I said, I’m thirteen now. And I’ve attempted suicide in the last week of February. They rushed me to the hospital, and then I guess they fixed me. I can’t remember really, I was drunk and on relaxants. I just remember one nurse shoving me in front of something and tell me to press my body against it. It was cold against my skin. Too cold. I remember being in the ambulance too. One of the two guys talked to me. But I’ll never tell anyone what he said to me, because it’s one of the very few good things I keep inside of me.

They kept me at the hospital overnight. I was in observation. The irony really was that four days before, I had been trying to imagine what it was like in observation, what with having never had to go to the hospital before. My mom had forced me to go to the emergency room because she found out about my self injury. It really wasn’t that bad. The cuts always healed perfectly and they covered only the lowest part of my hand to about three inches below. So I went to the hospital just for that. Waited about three hours just to have them tell us we needed to go to another hospital that was forty-five minutes away because they didn’t have a pedology department. The other hospital did. Great. This was so fun for me.

At the other hospital, they told me to just go on with the therapy the first hospital had proposed and that they’d see what they could do if it didn’t work out.

Anyways, all this to say that when I attempted suicide, I was sent to the first hospital for emergency treatment, then sent to the second in the psychiatric department. Good for me, it wasn’t the same psychiatrist as it was when I went the first time. I think that would’ve been the most embarassing moment of my life. They forced me to stay overnight in observation in the psychiatry department. I had been there too four days before promising myself that I’d never be there. The psychiatrist told me I had two choices: Hospitalisation on the 4th floor, with other teenagers like me, or hospitalisation on the first floor with other teenagers like me where I got to go back home morning and night. I spent some good time there. It was just like those places they have for teenagers to come hang out in at the community centers. Not all white and beds like I thought it would be. I learned a lot about myself there. I learned about people. I changed.

Then I had to leave. After a month and a half, most of the real friends I had made were gone. I had to leave the three educators who had taught me about the good in life. I had to leave the comfort I had found in that place behind. The hospital food I ate everyday, the way my educator would sing “My Heart Will Go On” just so we’d all laugh. The long talks I had with the person who drove me to the hospital every day. The smiles between me and Gab (who is the girl I keep contact with). All of it was gone in a heartbeat. My life was over. I was desperate to go back. But at least I kept contact with the most important person I met there. That at least was something I could live for while I settled back to my old life.

It’s been almost half a year since my suicide attempt. But I remember it like if it was yesterday. I still gag whenever I have to take any sort of pill. The last time I cut for real was the night before my last day at the hospital. Since then I’ve tried, but I haven’t been able to. And tonight I’m about to change all that. I’m desperate to go back to the hospital. I wanna heal for real. But to heal I have to be hurt. From the inside out.

It’s weird how five little marks on my hand can blow up into all this. I thought it would be fun. At first it was. And now it’s not anymore. And I’m starting to do it again. How stupid could I be?

 

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