Zeta Lanier breaks the barriers

Van Gogh did it, Eminem sings about it and Corey from Slipknot does it. Thousands do it, yet very few speak about it. It is one of those taboo subjects, where the mere mention of the word may result in awkwardness and disbelief as to what motivates someone to do it. ‘It’ is self-harm - when someone harms himself or herself on purpose, generally not with the intention of suicide. It includes cutting or bruising oneself, as well as burning, scratching and even things like hair-pulling and scrubbing, i.e. anything that causes injury to the body.

I am not writing this, though, to real off a list of facts about self-harm, nor to be patronising and say that it is wrong; I am writing this because I self-harm and have done in varying forms and degrees, on and off, since I was 11. For years I did not realise what I was doing, so I cannot even remember how frequently I self-harmed; there may have been years between one period of self-harm and the next. What I do know is that about three years ago, sometime during Year 11, it started getting worse. That was when I finally realised what I was doing and all the unease and misunderstanding self-harm causes other people. If anything, this made everything worse; what I did had a name, a label, which brought stigmatism and preconceptions with it. I felt so alone and isolated. I half wanted my friends or teachers to notice my bruises, definitely not because I wanted them to know I self-harmed, but because I wanted someone to realise how bad I was feeling and that I could not, even knew not how to, talk about it. I think that this is the same reason why I started self-harming without realising when I was 11. No one did ever notice though. It is harder than you would think to create a decent bruise from nothing (I used to just make accidental bruises worse when I was about 13), and mine were a feeble, pathetic attempt.

When I started Sixth Form I did something I had always imagined that I could never do; I cut myself for the first time. I am not sure what made me do it, maybe my feeble bruises no longer sufficed. On a few occasions, friends actually noticed my cuts, but they believed my outlandish excuses, such as “my scissors slipped” or “the cat went for me”. Like hitting myself, it was not a continuous thing throughout the whole of Sixth Form, and it seemed to “disappear” during the summer. Do not ask me why; I am uncertain myself. Last summer, ‘A’ Levels, leaving school and various other things kept me busy. Self-harm was tucked away in my autumnal/wintry thoughts; I tend to feel worse at that time of year. I am not sure exactly what then happened, but with the summer holiday period over, not having the security of the school routine to return to, most of my friends preparing to leave for university and, not trying to sound too clichéd, the events of September 11, I started cutting myself again. It was different though, worse than before; I could not deal with it and the way I was feeling on my own. I did not really want to deal with it all on my own. Somehow, I did something I had never expected to be able to do; I told someone, a youth worker, about my self-harm. That was back in September.

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