Catharine
I am sharing these images with a message for those who use self injury to manage unbearable emotions. I am in my fifties. I began coping with overwhelming feelings as a preschooler, by biting myself. Later I practiced ever more extreme cutting, starving, and vomiting. We are extremely sensitive people, for whom ordinary distractions do not work when we are in emotional agony; but our coping method destroyed my family, my health, my relationships, and my career, and wasted what should have been my most productive years.
In my forties I found other ways to regulate my emotions, without abandoning passion and sensitivity. It took effort, but I was able to develop contentment, without deadening the creativity, the spark. I learned how to love and raised a beautiful, bright daughter whom I had lost for over a year when she was a baby, and I was deemed unfit to mother. I returned to university and at 52 completed graduate school, determined to make up for lost time. I now enjoy health and powerful but bearable emotions — more ecstacy than agony. I exhibit artwork that is sometimes about our highly charged experiences.
Medical therapy exacerbated my problems, because I was as oversensitive and as hyper-reactive to medication as I am to everything else. I was almost killed by pharmaceutical restraints, but this near-death calamity lead me to Buddhist practice, and those methods worked for me. If therapy is not helping, or is making you crazier, I urge you to be a seeker. Go out into the world and search for wisdom, insight, guidance and methods to understand and transform your experience. It is out there. Something will work for you. Yes, cutting works; but there are other, less destructive ways.
I offer images of what your arms will look like in thirty years. The scars that were badges of our passion are not pretty now, and wearing long sleeves all summer is stifling. Your life will turn corners and offer opportunities, and as the memories of your pain fade, you will not want to be marked by the tracks of hard times.
I love you and wish you well. I pray that you too will find your way out of the pain, and into a lighter, more radiant and happy state of being. If I could do it, anyone can.
These are scans of what your arms will look like in your fifties. Not pretty. Take care, take care.
