october 18th, 2019

trigger warning: self-harm, general heavy topics

i can’t stop doing it.

until there are battlefields all across my skin, as i reopen another little wound yet again, and somehow… don’t really feel anything about it. because it’s normal to take out your fears on your body, isn’t it?

every time i see myself in the mirror, i want to shatter the glass. so maybe you can understand why right now, i don’t want help. i just want you to look away, and pretend i don’t exist.

because i won’t be good enough for the monster in my head until i don’t exist. because i have to tear myself down, bit. by. bit. until there’s nothing left but a ruined statue, or a tragedy, or whatever it was you wanted.

 and it’s so close to normal, until it isn’t any longer. and i’m so close to fine, until… i don’t know how to stop myself anymore. 

I know I trigger warning’d this poem with self-harm, the best term I could think of, but that’s not really what this is about, I think. I don’t know, it feels more complex than that. So here’s the whole story. For a long time, I’ve struggled with picking at my skin–opening little wounds, again and again, as a way of dealing with anxiety, Scratching at myself. Demolishing my cuticles, tearing off little bits of skin without even realizing it. Compulsively fiddling with a wound when I get nervous. I don’t know what that is, I don’t have a diagnosis or any way to categorize it, but I do know that I struggle with it. It’s one of those things I don’t really know how to talk about–partially just because when you’ve been doing something so long, and especially since a young age… well, you learn to normalize it. You forget… that other people don’t live like this. So decided to write about it. Just a little bit. Even in the kind of quiet way I doubt most people reading this will pick up on.