A year later…

Just under a year ago things went south for me. It was probably the most significant crisis I have had. It certainly equals the sad mess I was in, in 2009 when I was first diagnosed.

Content note: The following includes reference to historical suicidal feelings and planning

I can’t really give you a timeline of any of this, because last summer is a bit of a blank to me*. I know that there were some horrendous missed chances for help from NHS services, and some more rapid responses once I actually spoke to the CMHT. I know I ended up at a pretty high end of support with daily calls from the shared care team which, while not particularly impactful in changing how I felt, was a pretty clear bit of risk assessment on their end.

What came before that? I’m not sure. I don’t remember how I got from “pretty normal” to not. I can only give sketches of what it was like when it was clear to me things were wrong.

I spent more and more time unable to speak. And a lot of time crying silently in an utterly inconsolable, unrelieving way.

I remember one day I was walking home through the park and I passed a colleague. They greeted me warmly. But for a few minutes that felt like hours, I literally could not recognise them. And once I did, I couldn’t remember how to respond. It was like wading through treacle to achieve that recognition and then deliver a social nicety which is normally as instinctive as breathing. I couldn’t find what it is you do.

I self harmed and felt nothing. I remember looking at the injury I had inflicted and wondering, with a detached sort of scientific curiosity, what had happened to me that I could no longer feel such physical sensation.

On another occasion I talked animatedly to a friend about how I was going to kill myself. And laughed as I explained it would categorically be a success. I can’t remember the friend’s face. I imagine now, it was a look of horror. They tell me they were terrified.

I became obsessed with a single thought: completing a to do list I had written concerned with getting my estate in order and fulfilling all my social committments, ahead of the date I had decided to kill myself. I had a plan I was – and am – convinced would be successful.

It’s hard to say why I called the NHS psychiatrist’s office. And harder still to say why I called again a week later when they hadn’t, as they’d promised, called me back. But I did. It was then things went into action around me and despite not having any conscious wish to lift a finger to save my own life, I engaged. I started swallowing pills again

In the days and weeks that followed, I discovered an incredible local service for people experiencing mental health difficulties which was simply a safe space to exist in, in the evenings. I sat there one night and cried and cried and they just kept bringing me cups of tea.

There isn’t one thing to point to as the cause. Because life, minds, emotional collapse, don’t work like that. In retrospect, it was almost everything. I can list the components, but the sum was greater than the whole: excessive workload, huge life changes (I bought a house ffs), living through the pandemic, relationship breakdown, a sense I had failed professionally and a shift in how I saw my future… All that on top of never really dealing with what had bought me to crisis point 18 months earlier. It was, perhaps, inevitable.

Once I made contact with the CMHT, I was signed off work for two months, and eventually returned on reduced duties. I had an OH review and went through Access to Work to get significant changes implemented to my working pattern and conditions.

I returned to work humbled. Ashamed of myself for my weakness, for my messiness, for all the things I couldn’t quite remember and the sense that someone else had been piloting my body through my life for a few months. Waking up to months of missed and poorly completed work which had marked the time proceeding total collapse. I had to fight my own corner at work, at a time I was least able to do so. I was lucky, it was sheer dumb luck, to hit upon two or three people in different places who cleared the way for me to get what I needed in to make a return to work possible and to give me space to get back to a basic emotional operating level.

There isn’t an ending to this post. It’s not yet a year since the slow and understaffed machinery of the NHS spluttered into action in response to my threat to myself. I am not yet able to talk to my therapist about last summer. I am still recovering from the shock that such ill health inflicts on your sense of self and your confidence. I am changed. I am always changed by crisis.

I don’t want to ever experience that again. The chances are, I will.

* On reviewing this before posting, I discover I last posted in August. It’s not just that I have no memory of doing this, it’s that that post doesn’t even feel familiar when I read it. That’s what I mean by “a blank”. I wasn’t steering the ship, last summer.

Safe

Things have been busy since my last entry. Including an assessment with the psychiatrist and all the turmoil that brings, a lot of being on strike (14 days over 4 weeks), a bit of a romantic fling which finished uncomfortably, and the explosion of everyone’s favourite global pandemic with all the difficult and strange changes to our lives that has prompted.

Overall my mood is pretty stable again. I’m a long way off where I was about a year ago through to the summer. My mood drops with my energy levels. And my energy levels tend to plummet after about 5 hours of being awake so there’s stuff to try and work on there – some of which I’m trying to do with the GP by addressing my dodgy iron and B12 levels.

What has been important to me in the past couple of months is being around people who make me feel safe.

I’m struggling to understand what that means and what it is about a handful of people which makes me feel safe. There are four men and one woman in my life who, likely entirely unknown to them, make me feel safe. There are a couple of other people who give me that feeling to a lesser degree. Being with them is sometimes quite painful – initially it’s a relief, a sense of being able to unclench, breathe deep. But it is most accutely painful when I have to leave their company. A little like stepping back into a freezing winter’s night after an afternoon in front of a roaring fire; shoulders up, lips clenched, muscles tensed.

Why is it [mostly] men who make me feel like this? What do they have in common? It’s not all the men I know, it’s not people I necessarily have a deep or long lasting connection with. It’s not that we do any specific activities or have certain types of conversation. This week I ditched a person I had started dating because I felt overwhelmed by her; but those people I feel safe around make me feel overwhelmed too. With them it’s more total; as though I’ve just been folded into their certainty and they are going to catch me out and pull me back if my mood, my thoughts, begin to drift away from that.

How can I become the person who makes me feel safe? Should I try and find a person to date who makes me feel like that or would that mean I’m setting myself up for an unhealthy relationship of dependency? Is experiencing – craving – this feeling of safety an indication of an emotional, psychological immaturity?

I’m afraid the people who make me feel safe will find out and be disgusted and pull back from their friendship with me and I’ll lose something which right now feels like a lifeline.

I am thinking about self harm a lot at the moment. Seeing my method of self harm recorded in black and white in the psychiatrist’s report was difficult to process. It was almost impossible to get the words out to describe what I do. He didn’t laugh (a psychiatrist I saw about 10 years ago, did) but he did say “it is…err…unusual” and the strangeness of self harm as it appears to others was held up to me to reflect on. I don’t know why it’s so incomprehensible and/or makes people so upset to consider. I really cannot process it from non-self harming people’s perspective.

I think the impulse to self harm is tied up with this longing to be with the people who make me feel safe – and the ways in which I do/do not feel safe. I feel physically sick at the thought this is how I will feel for the rest of my life. That this is just a baseline. That there is no safe harbour.

Boring

Being mad is, above all other things, boring.

Same cycling moods. Same paranoia. Same neurosis. Same self-harm. Same rambling, irrational verbalisations of the experience.

The whole “just ask for help”, the “if you want to talk, I’ll always be here” thing. It’s all…difficult in the face of that.

“Help! I’m in crisis! Admittedly…it is the same crisis I was in 3 months ago. And I’ll say the same things I did then. And so will you. And it’ll pass, like it did last time but…”

How can I pierce through my friend’s Saturday nights – good, bad, indifferent as they may be – to ask them to keep me company through this most familiar, most urgent but also most recurrent mood?

Yes, I’ll self harm. But in the scheme of things, does that really matter? Is my non-permanent self-damage really more significant than their comfortable night in, or night out, or early night? Of course it isn’t.  And why at 30-mumble-mumble years old am I still incapable of actually taking responsibility for myself on that front?

Why can’t I heal myself? Why can’t I care for myself in a manner which doesn’t shape my clothing choices for the next 3-4 weeks? Why am I so incapable of managing my own moods that I have the option of being “the crazy, exhausting, always something wrong” friend or the “distant, so fun, really hard to pin down” friend who definitely never reveals any of this?

Why can’t I be a whole person?

High Stakes Gambling

I wrote some time ago about coming across the idea that bipolar disorder[s] is an ‘allergy to stress’ and oh boy, if that’s true then the run up to a general election, whilst working 3 jobs and having no confirmed employment after August is like bathing in peanut oil/sleeping in a hay bale/other extreme exposure to common allergen.

I have been riding some fairly extreme [within the context of cyclothymia] highs and lows this past month of two. A couple of weeks ago I had one of the most glorious, free wheeling, ‘good god have you noticed how extremely attractive I am’ periods of hypomania I’ve had in literally years. In fact, it was so pure, I began to believe I wouldn’t experience its corollary.

Of course, I was wrong.

It began to float into view last week.  Like the edges of your vision darkening, or when sea mist starts to roll in and you look to the horizon and can’t quite make out where you can normally see too, but you’re sure it used to be further.

This particular low is everything the hypomania was not. Or, more accurately, the absolute inverse of everything the hypomania was. I was confident, felt sexy and sexual, energetic, funny, articulate, optimistic; now I’m defeated, heavy, pessimistic, distracted and forgetful.  Reflections, which began in conversation with a friend, on my own [experience of] gender that had seemed so intriguing and freeing, have become an internal monologue, a weight, and a source of fear.

I started smoking again. I self harmed.

It’s hard to deal with times like this. I write, often, about the ways I try and manage my cyclothymia through my lifestyle. Generally, I try to stamp down on my impulse to really let highs run unchecked and don’t indulge them by drinking and not sleeping.

But sometimes the allure is too great, the release from the everyday is so welcome, and the energy that runs through me from head to toe is just liberating.

I can’t really eat gluten without getting a lot of pain, and getting quite sick. An NHS consultant advised me to avoid it. Every now and again though, I smell fresh bread in the supermarket, or see a particularly mouthwatering-looking cake, and I think ‘fuck it, the pain is worth it’ and I gorge myself for an afternoon, or a day. As I double over in pain the next day – or sometimes just a few hours later – I usually think “I really should stop doing this, it’s not worth it”. But then the pain subsides, I stumble back out into the world and I sort of…forget.

Stress will keep coming; there will always be something to tip me over into another hard cycle. And the option to ride the wave of unsettled mood as far as it goes will keep presenting itself to me. As long as I can survive the lows, actually hang on through them to the other side, is it really the worst thing to take that pay off from time to time?

Just ‘doing it for attention’

I’ve been haunted by the accusation that I am ‘just doing [whatever] for attention’ since I first heard it levelled at people who self harmed, and then my fear deepened when a friend at school accused me of it in response to my not eating.

Fear of being thought of as ‘attention seeking’ as a teenager meant I hid every element of my unhappiness.  I was petrified that someone would discover my self harm and call me an attention seeker, so I painstakingly covered.  For a decade.  And I was afraid I would be called attention seeking for not eating, so even when the school nurse cautioned I was ‘under weight’ I didn’t say a word – and publicly laughed at such an absurd assessment.

The difficult thing is, I think, that these actions are attention seeking.  But bear with me: probably not quite in the way you’re thinking.

Teenagers, in particular, are going through unparalleled emotional, bodily, and cognitive/intellectual changes. Their social relationships are radically rearranging themselves as they re-orientate themselves around peers rather than family, their bodies are changing in very obvious ways in terms of puberty and hormones, but they are also changing into the shape that will likely determine how they experience much of their rest of their lives.  More than this, they are exploring increasingly intense and sometimes romantic relationships, and learning about the pleasure their bodies can achieve in consent with others. They are coming to terms with ideas like mortality, and able for the first time to take responsibility for assessing risks and gambling their own safety.

Looking back on who I was as a deeply unhappy 14-18 year old, I still don’t know how to fully articulate that experience, or how I could have communicated the sense of being lost in my own body, baffled by my new and changing emotions, isolated from my [seemingly] entirely-heterosexual surroundings, and the fear and exhilaration I was encountering as I began taking risks with drugs and alcohol.

What I can see when I look back, is a young woman trying to ask people around her to help.  I did want attention – I wanted someone to show me how to navigate that transition in my life, I wanted someone to tell me my feelings were as significant and life-altering as they felt, I wanted someone to validate the depth of the things I felt without calling me “dramatic” (another favourite accompaniment to ‘attention-seeking’). In a sea of other teenagers, all struggling to find themselves and each other, I wanted to be seen.  I needed attention that distinguished me from the crowd (‘bloody teenagers’) and reassured me I was valuable.

My heart aches for how isolated and lost I was at this time – how desperately I wanted someone to notice the physical actions I was taking to ask for help, and how entirely unable I was to do that verbally.  Ultimately, two parents of my friends, two of my best friends, and a girlfriend, helped me in the ways I needed.

Subconsciously, I think altering your body through self-harm and disordered eating are, ultimately, actions which some part of your mind knows will draw attention.  Faced with a total lack of language for those feelings, or the skills of reflection and introspection we develop into adulthood, how else can young people communicate their need for care, for guidance, for help, for attention?

As adults, we’re expected to move away from these actions, to develop different strategies, to recognise that harming ourselves as a cry for help is ’emotionally manipulative’.  As I understand it, one criteria which is used to identify and diagnose borderline personality disorder relates to ‘manipulative’ or ‘attention seeking’ behaviour and I know a number of people with symptoms/moods similar to mine who have been diagnosed with BPD, apparently largely because of their long term self harm. I also know many of these people have repeatedly sought psychiatric help, have repeatedly asked, calmly, clearly and with specific evidence of need and defined goals, for emotional support from the appropriate health care providers; and they have been turned away.  What can you do when expressing in words, in ‘acceptable’ ways, your need for help is unsuccessful?

I  know someone who works as a NHS Psychiatrist and is called to A&Es to assess people in crisis – usually at the point they are expressing suicidal impulses or engaging in actions of self harm.  This psychiatrist can only recommend people are admitted, but cannot create the NHS beds for them to be accommodated.  These people are also, ultimately, turned away.  They might return, ever more desperate, ever less able to communicate, ever more extreme in the physical actions they take. The chronically underfunded NHS, teetering on the point of collapse, ends up labelling these people “attention seekers”.  And, implicitly, that means ‘not in need of attention’.

Attention seekers, in an age of YouTube and Facebook and make-your-own-celebrity, who instead chose to endanger their lives and permanently alter their bodies rather than start a blog (hey-oh!) or a YouTube channel or an Instagram account? Something doesn’t add up there, does it? If this was about seeking ‘attention’ there are a hundred easier routes to it.  Self harm, suicidal gestures, and disordered eating, and a hundred other self-injurious actions are about seeking attention, but not any kind of attention.  Attention – help – for chronic, overwhelming, unmanageable experiences of fear, pain, anxiety, loss or some other catastrophic emotional state.  They are the last refuge of people who either cannot discover the words to convey their emotional state and their need for support, or who have communicated their desperate need for help and not been heard.

Why else seek attention through actions, unless because nobody is listening?

My conclusion is two-fold.

On a personal note, I remind myself of all of this as I wrangle self-harm impulses.  I don’t want to self harm, what I want right now is help with these unmanageable emotions of stress, anxiety, and fear.

More generally; that attention-seeking is not bad, or wrong, or evidence that there is not a mental health condition, an emotional need underlying it.  That we must care for, and be patient with teenagers in particular and be cautious not to dismiss their actions as dramatic or (most hated of words) ‘angst’.

People ask for help in many ways – often it is not with words because those words are either not available, or not heard.

Thinking about chronic mental ill health

I’ve been reflecting recently on the way I view my own mental health.  I write often on here, and on twitter, about hitting a ‘hypomanic period’ or a ‘depressive period’ because, as I leap from one to another, I think of them as separate events.  But not only does a hypomanic ‘period’ inevitably lead into a depressive one, they aren’t isolated incidents.  They are, cumulatively, cyclothymia itself.

It’s been useful (necessary?) for me, up to now, to think of them as separate events which I pass between and through rather than thinking of them, along with my ‘stable’ periods, as a whole, and a connected manifestation of cyclothymia.  I needed to think of them as distinct periods which had clear starts and ends because then I am not always ‘within’ cyclothymia – I didn’t know how else to conceptualise it, how else to describe it without suggesting it defined my entire life.  Increasingly, this kind of thinking has made me feel more despairing about experiencing highs and lows; why can I never stamp those emotions down permanently? Why do those feelings keep resurfacing when I beat them down last time? What am I doing wrong that I can’t win the war?

I’m thinking, today, about the language of chronic illness.  I found this article an interesting read: 5 ways you’re not ‘living’ with chronic illness which recommends some shifts in how we think about our own chronic ill health in order to prevent it taking over/directing one’s entire life.  When I decided to stop therapy and come off meds I believe I addressed the first point – stop looking for the why.  There are many, many theories from genetic to social and beyond that propose reasons why individuals develop cyclothymia and other conditions; none of them offer me a solution. So why was I pursuing treatments which offered me little help but were founded on one or more of those theories?  As I’ve said before, med free is not the right choice for everyone, but I got so little from the various drug treatments I tried, walking away instead of pouring more energy into finding the ‘miracle’ cure for me was the right way to stop living under cyclothymia and start living with it.

Point 2 is also something I’m fortunate I’ve been able to achieve.  

Point 3 gives me pause though; you’re not living with chronic illness if you’re hating yourself.  Self-loathing is both symptomatic of cyclothymia and caused by it.  I, like many other people I have spoken to with this illness, have lost things and people that mattered because of some of the ways cyclothymia manifests itself in both action and personality.  And, as I mention above, I come to hate myself for not being able to fix myself, for not being able to simply step out of this restrictive jacket of cyclothymia and into a life of cheerful ease.  Which leads me, as it does the article, into point 4; you’re not living with chronic illness if you’re fighting it.  This doesn’t mean stop trying to improve my health and manage my illness; it means accepting a paradigm shift from thinking of it as something to be ‘cured‘ or ‘fixed’ to thinking of it as something to be managed, contained and yes, as the article’s title says, lived with.

I am not failing because the ups and downs keep coming. I am not [and I struggle to write this, but I must try to explore the idea] unlovable because I have mood swings.  I am coping.  I am managing to get through my life in lots of ways that are great, and celebratory.  I am not a fighter – I am resilient.  Winning (if we must persist with the language of a fight) with chronic illness like cyclothymia, means carrying on each day and finding and using new ways to make life easier, moods more manageable, and life more fulfilled.

For example, right now I’m once again in a particularly brutal down-swing.  And I find myself compulsively harming myself; simply to contain my emotional extremes, in order to, for example, prevent myself from crying on the bus home, or from weeping during a party.  If I think of each down-swing as a separate event, I have no explanation for my self injurious behaviour.  

If I think of all my down-swings as part of a single experience of mental ill health (which of course, is precisely what it is and why my entire emotional experience is diagnosed with a single condition) then my current behaviour is simply a resurgence of a symptom I have less frequently than some others. It’s just a ‘flare up’ of one of the least pleasant elements of this illness. And if that’s true, it’s not that I’ve totally failed to maintain my previous progress, it’s just that, this time, the down-swing is particularly intense and as long as I keep moving forward (point 5 from the article) after this, and keep thinking of what I can do to make those symptoms less destructive and emerge less frequently (perhaps by identifying what has pushed me that bit further this time – stress?) then I am living with cyclothymia. I am still in control.

Honesty is the best policy

I started this blog with the intention to share my experiences of living with cyclothymia, and some of the things I’ve learnt to make life a bit easier.  I’ve had a great response to some of the posts I’ve put up so far which has been really gratifying, and I’m working on a cyclothymia FAQ based on search results that are bringing people here (and please feel free to submit your own questions – and answers if you want – in the comments and I’ll include those too).  The flip side, however, is that this aim has become self-silencing.

I don’t have all the answers – I struggle with cyclothymia from month to month but also, sometimes, from day to day.  If I can’t tie up an experience with a “and this is what I’ve learned” I’ve become disinclined to blog about it.  I’m also reluctant to admit that dealing with cyclothymia is not an up and up process.  There are as many steps backward as there are forward ones.  Things go wrong. I fuck up.

I’ve been through more than a month of near constant cycling; straight into a high after every low, no respite, no calm.  My highs have been anxious nightmares, my lows have been crushing, numbing, long.  I spent 12 days sleeping for no more than 6 broken hours a night.  I argued with friends and family and ran away to the other side of the country for 3 days.  I’m self harming occasionally.  I’m failing miserably at maintaining any kind of schedule, getting work done, or socialising.  My occasional honest tweets or conversations where I reveal how I’m feeling are causing friends to become concerned for my well-being which in turn causes me to fall into a guilt spiral of self recrimination and self loathing.

I’ve idly considered going to my GP and asking for a referral to a psychiatrist to discuss medication options but then I remember how many medications I’ve tried over the years, the total disregard for my wishes last time I tried to tackle cyclothymia with meds (“oh you have horrible side effects on a mind-blowingly high dose? Tough luck. And no, we can’t discuss other options. I’ve met you twice now so I’m discharging you back to your GP.  No, I still don’t care you’re not happy with this treatment”), and the massive amount of ambivalence out there in medical-knowledge-psychiatry world about whether treating cyclothymia with meds is ever a good plan.

So here it is; cyclothymia really bites.  It’s biting really hard right now.  It’s sunk it’s teeth in these last few weeks and I can’t shake loose.  And I’m not managing to always win, or even sustain my small gains in some places.  It’s not an easy road. And more than once this week I’ve wished for a new brain.

That’s how it is.

Wearing my heart on my sleeve

I spoke in therapy the other week about the frustration I feel at having to bare my soul every time I bare my arms, I’ve been continuing to think over those thoughts and feelings ever since.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not under any allusion that I have especially severe scarring, or that I am worse off than people with burns or other scars.  This is not a pity party, this is just me talking about what it’s like to walk around in my body.

I self harmed from the age of 14 to somewhere around the age of 22, 23.  I stopped self harming on a daily-ish basis at around 19.  Inevitably, cutting and burning oneself for that period of time has a considerable impact on your skin.  My arms are pretty scarred up.  Year on year, as I continue to abstain, the scars fade a little more but it’s going to be a long time before they really become unnoticeable – or even just easy to miss.

Until May last year I had never ever worn short sleeves to work.  So that’s roughly 10 years in work wearing long sleeves in every weather – even the stiflingly hot days.  In May, at a conference at the University I work and study at, I broke.  I was wearing a thin jacket over a t-shirt in 30 degrees.  I was running around organising things and I realised that if I didn’t take my jacket off then, at 9:30am, I’d have sweat stains from armpit to ankle by the end of the day.  So I whipped off my jacket and did the day in a t-shirt.  Presenting my research to colleagues and superiors with my arms on show.  Hosting an all day event in an t-shirt.

That evening, stress and exhaustion and lack of food combined to make me roaring drunk after 2 glasses of wine.  At dinner I confided in a friend and colleague that this was the first time I had ever worn short sleeves in a professional environment.  Something flashed across her face before she spoke – relief I’d mentioned it? Horror I was talking about it?  She confessed “yes, [other colleague] and I spoke about [your arms] earlier, do you still do it?”.  “No,” I replied “not for years. But that’s just the problem, I have to carry around my teenage self and all her decisions for everyone to see.  Lots of people did stupid things as teenagers, but I can’t avoid people making assumptions about me based on what they can see, I can’t leave my teenage self behind”.  She sympathised but assured me that our work environment – a university – may be one of the best places to be ‘out’ about something like this. I’m sceptical about that, but that’s another post.

There was a lot of compassion and understanding in the conversation I had with my colleague that night, but her first response, the very first words out of her mouth confirmed what I always fear – the scarred flesh of my arms is a topic of conversation, it is worthy of remark.  I have been approached by strangers in the street in the summer who demand to know what is ‘wrong’ with my arms, I was cornered by classmates in Sixth Form accusing me of self harming and demanding I confess it to them, I have been asked by waiting staff, shop assistants, security officers.  Somehow, for some reason, visible signifiers of mental distress make your body public property. People believe they have the right to demand an explanation from you, to insist on [one way] emotional intimacy.

I can have a great day, sunning myself on the beach or in the city, shopping, laughing with friends, living life in the most enjoyable and energetic way but a single person, a single remark from a stranger can cut through all that, bring me crashing to earth feeling small and exposed.

“What’s wrong with your arms? You cut them, didn’t you?”

Having self harm scars is like walking around with a mental health hangover.  Always forced to reveal more than you consent to people you don’t know. Always knowing that whilst friends and colleagues might be understanding, might not care, it will invariably come after a gasp, a whispered conversation, a furtive look.

Perhaps it’s surprising then, that my primary response is anger.  You ask me directly, with no preamble, with no intimacy, what is ‘wrong’ with my arms and I’ll reply “nothing. What’s wrong with your face?”  Say “did you cut your arms?” I’ll say “no, I raise tiger cubs”. Call me a liar, I’ll call you a dick.

My body, not yours. Not yours to demand an explanation of, not yours to judge me by, not yours to know me by.

Anger is the big front to the awful, gnawing insecurity I feel about my arms.  I wear long sleeves to avoid these questions and assumptions, not to save anyone difficult considerations.  I wish the scars away sometimes.  But I also think of them as a part of my journey as much as the various tattoos I have.  Would I vanish them all tomorrow if I could? Almost certainly yes.  Although one of the biggest roles they play in my life today is as a disincentive to self harming again so I waver slightly at the thought of maintaining that resolve without a reminder of why.

Perhaps most frustrating is that whilst the scars on my arms hint at a past and mental health history, they don’t tell the whole story.  They give half a picture and a million assumptions and stereotypes about what a ‘cutter’ is.  They don’t say “fought past that, deal better now, in control, managing a whole other condition these days”  They don’t say “I’m more than this” They don’t say “you see one thing, but you don’t know what it means, where it came from, or where I’m going”.  And, somehow, they make me into an awkward teenager in the eyes of people who would otherwise see a thirty-something.

Scarred arms leave me no choice in who knows what, or when.  And that fucks me off.  But I’m not angry with myself – I’m angry with those people, those strangers, who think they know something about me because of it.