I have a new essay out in Arc Poetry Magazine about nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI). I talk about my own experiences with cutting and what people get wrong about self-injury. It’s probably one of my favourite pieces I’ve written.
The issue is edited by Therese Estacion and it’s disability themed! You can get a digital or a physical copy here. I’ve also published the essay below because I’ve been feeling isolated lately from people and sharing my writing makes me feel more connected to others ❤️🔥. PS - I left some thoughts out of the final version, but included them in this post here. Maybe this will all be part of something longer in the future.
CW for cutting, self-injury
Cut you open
When I was twelve-years-old, I became a cutter. Becoming a cutter is easy. It doesn't require any special skill sets, only a knowledge that one can use their body as an instrument for blood. I learned how to cut by watching some day-time talk show. The episode featured a girl with fresh scars running up and down her arms, her mother sobbing at the base of the stage, cameras trained on their domestic misery. The girl mentions something about it making her feel good. She mentions the word endorphins. I wanted that feeling. If cutting could get me there, then I would do it.
Like most medical-themed episodes, the host pressures their guest into treatment—to put an end to the behaviour. The episode was meant to be moralizing and recovery-oriented, but it marked the start of my own cutting. What would a twelve-year-old know about recovery?
♦
Filed under “conditions for further study,” the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) defines nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) as deliberate, self-inflicted bodily harm without suicidal intent. People may cut, hit, or burn themselves to relieve or regulate negative emotions, resolve interpersonal conflict, or induce a positive feeling state. These behaviours—it goes without saying—are not socially-accepted and are frequently stigmatized. The definition is narrow, as a definition needs to be, but I do find the DSM particularly helpful in dispelling one thing: that self-injury does not necessarily mean suicidal. The boundaries, of course, are not always so clear, and self-injury may be both suicidal and non-suicidal. Self-injury is, for many, used as a form of harm reduction. But separating self-injury from suicidality may open up new ways of looking at this behaviour.
The meanings attached to NSSI are often negative.1 Cuts and scars may be considered “disgusting” or “bad” by people who do not self-injure. Visible wounds or scars may be interpreted as attention-seeking, manipulative, or as a “serious cry for help.” Cutters get a lot of hate. Literature on NSSI also continues to use stigmatizing language. People who self-injure are described as “severely disturbed” or as “self-mutilators.” Other literature is treatment focused, i.e. wanting the behaviour to stop. As well, some scholars fear that the inclusion of this label in the DSM-5 will contribute to further discrimination against people who self-injure. Amy Chandler, a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh, and herself a cutter, worries that the label will mark “anyone who injures themselves intentionally” as “potentially psychiatrically disordered.”
How would I define my cutting? It certainly wasn’t about killing myself. My cutting functioned instead as a kind of emotional sorting. The euphoria that cutting provided allowed me to sort through my emotions safely: here is my anger, here is my sadness. It was much like a game I had played with my friends as a child. A finger sliced down your arm and whispered the directive, cut you open. Then a fist kneaded up and down the inside of your arm, the voice again, fill you with rocks. Then the finger slid back up your skin, sew you back up. Repeat several times. When they let go of your arm, it dropped down suddenly. It really felt like you were full of rocks. Of course, it was just a trick. Your arm got used to being supported by the other person so when they let go, the weight of your own body dragged you down.
With self-injury, each rock was an emotion I had unintentionally stored away. Stuck feelings that I couldn't release. I didn’t want any more rocks under my skin. I wanted to be cut open again and for the rocks to come spilling out and for my body to become lighter and disappear somewhere in the rush of euphoria. Blood. Power. Euphoria.
I don’t remember the first time I cut, probably because it was always the same. Cutting stories are not very interesting. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say that mine aren’t. (Cutting stories have never reached the cultural level of alcoholic drinking stories, for example.) Mine take place alone, in a room, and end in the same way. My cutting stories go like this: Go to the bathroom. Retrieve a disposable razor. Use scissors to cut through the plastic guards and dig out one of the blades. Walk to the bedroom. Sit down on the floor. Cut, cut, cut. Watch the blood pool beneath ankles. Blood. Euphoria. Blood. Go back to the bathroom. Run ankles under the tub faucet. Watch the blood some more as it edges down the drain. Pat skin dry. Wrap toilet paper around ankles. Tie a little knot. Secure further with socks carefully rolled up over the toilet paper dressing. Wrap blade in a wash cloth and shove into the nightstand drawer. Sleep. What more is there to say, really, in a cutting story?
Maybe the healing process, the healing story, is more interesting, only because it involves other people. There are people to hide the cuts from. (Long socks will get the job done.) There is also the wound care. (Polysporin, bandaids, checking for infection.) Self-injury is not a singular event. The pain continues for a few weeks, if you’re lucky. The cuts throb as they heal, pain ebbing and flowing as blood pumps to them; the scabs itch horribly a few days in. I don’t think endorphins are necessarily released at this stage, but the body becomes activated by the constant discomfort.
I caught glimpses of self-injury elsewhere: Burn marks on someone’s legs. Scars under bracelets. One girl would push up her sleeves in class, deep wounds slashed into her skin. No one caught glimpses of mine, at least not in those early days of cutting.
The closest anyone would get to my cutting was a boy named Zac. I met Zac at an all-ages show put on by our church network. He lived in a different town and we talked on the phone a lot. He liked to keep me on the line even when I had nothing else to say. I would breathe into the phone and look out my bedroom window. His soft breath punctuated mine. Our mouths pressed tight into the receiver.
One night, at a house party, Zac leaned in to grab my ankles while we talked on a couch. As he squeezed, the thin scabs under my socks threatened to break open. I didn’t pull away. I let him go on squeezing. It was the first time someone had touched my cuts, through my socks, and a longing so deep pulsed inside of me. I can still feel it now. He was touching my pain.
♦
Self-injury has largely been shaped (and limited) by clinical knowledge. How can we get away from this? Even self-injury art has a hard time getting away from medicalization. The spectre of the psychiatric ward is never far off. This is understandable: if you cut, there is a threat you will be locked up or medicated. Films and songs about cutting inevitably revolve around the hospital or patienthood. Lee Holloway in Secretary is released from the psych ward in the opening scene. Shirley Manson wanders around the hallways of a hospital dressed as a nurse in the music video for Garbage’s “Bleed Like Me.” Brigitte Fitzgerald in Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed is involuntarily committed after she’s found passed out in a snowbank, cuts and track marks visible on her arms.
The creation of self-injury themed content (i.e. photographs, poems, drawings, digital videos, and blogs) has been hotly debated by health professionals and researchers. In particular, there remains a considerable amount of anxiety over the representation and online circulation of the self-injured body. Discussions typically focus on the potentially triggering aspect of self-injury content and that NSSI content may encourage other individuals to self-injure—a sort of social contagion. (What do you do if your body is literally a trigger?) Similar discussions trail the anorexic body. The contagion is often visual, prompting others to lose weight, to calorie restrict, in other words, to ultimately become like the bodies they are looking at. The takeaway: Do not circulate these bodies. Less often, discussions focus on the positive effects of NSSI content: peer support, social awareness, and creative self-reflection. NSSI content may also act as a deterrent to self-injure.
I didn't photograph my cuts or produce that kind of self-injury content. That would have made my cutting oriented towards someone other than myself. (Although writing about it here is, perhaps, a form of self-injury content.) Once, I carved “DIE” into my ankle, but it was done in a pathetic, non-committal sort of way. I’ve cut over the same area so many times that, thankfully, the word has become illegible. A patchwork of barely perceptible scars cover my ankles. They shimmer when the light hits them or bloom after a hot shower, like the One Ring when Gandalf throws it into the fire—the heat makes the scars glow to reveal my secret.
♦
In my early twenties, I began taking pictures of roadkill. I don’t know why I started doing this. I didn’t like that the animals were dead. In fact, I was angry that someone had hit them and had driven off. I think I liked getting physically close to the animals.
Documenting roadkill took on the same meaning as my cutting. It became a sort of meditative blood trance as I focused my camera lens over parts of the ruptured animal. Click. Matted crimson fur. Click. Flattened organs. (Cut, cut, cut. Click, click, click).
Once I started looking for roadkill, it appeared everywhere. It was the same way with cutting.
The act of searching produced more roadkill, more cutters, or maybe it was because I was paying more attention to these things. I only had to leave my house before inevitably happening upon a dead animal. Squirrels, raccoons, birds, a weasel. Sometimes I went back just a few hours later, camera in hand, and the roadkill was gone. “Where did it go,” I wondered. I wanted to get to the bottom of this.
I phoned city hall and was transferred to the engineering department, which apparently handled city hygiene. I explained to the director on the other end that I wanted to know where roadkill went. Surprisingly, he invited me in for a tour. A few days later, I drove to the engineering offices, housed in a mildew-coloured government building next to potato fields and the abandoned cow tunnels that ran beneath the highway. I sat in his office—messy, stacks of paper everywhere—as he explained the operation: The department would get a call about a dead animal. Someone would be sent out to the site. They’d arrive, then bag the animal. Simple. Then he led me to the roadkill room.
He pointed to several chest freezers. “We keep the roadkill in there,” he said. It was difficult to make out the freezers from the lightbulb illuminated on the ceiling, but I could still see signs taped to each of the lids: “Wild Animals; Domestic Animals; Rabbits.” Why rabbits were individually sorted and contained still puzzles me. He told me that once the chests were full, the animals were taken to a pet crematorium in a neighbouring town and incinerated.
We walked back to his office, and the man gave me a pair of heavy-duty gloves, the same kind that city workers used when picking up roadkill, as something of a memento, in case I wanted to do my own cleaning up. I assume he was joking. I kept those gloves for a long time.
The pictures I took of roadkill wound up in my first and only solo art show at a student-run art gallery at my university. The photos were terrible: there was one of a squirrel that had been reconfigured into a puddle of blood and flesh from being repeatedly run over; another framed the blood-stained mouth of a racoon against the rainbow oil-slicked pavement; my favourite was of a rabbit, the skin on its front elbow peeled back and a firecracker brutally shoved into its eye socket. I was proud of them at the time, of course, but I cringe looking back at my subject matter. Why did I think that anyone would care about roadkill? I wanted guests to look at the animals and feel what, exactly? That they were seeing something grotesque, something similar to what I had kept hidden? Did I want them to contemplate these bodies, ripped open and mutilated? Did I want them to accept their wounds?
In this essay, I focus on cutting within the NSSI label. This is not to erase other forms of self-injury. It’s also worth pointing out that NSSI research has predominantly focused on women, constructing the “typical” self-injurer as white, middle-class, female, and young (i.e. me). This is, of course, simply not true, and points to how medical knowledge is imperfectly produced.