Cut Through.

I have been asked quite a lot about why I used to cut and what led me to it.  I share with you an excerpt from an email I sent to a close friend.

When we met I was already cutting.  I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t really “dead” and in actuality, I was indeed living in Hell on Earth.  I started out making “points” on my skin of the constellation Orion (The Hunter) with a sharp pencil.  As an astronomy geek, I knew that Orion can be seen from anywhere in the world, and that comforted me, something constant in my fucked up life.  Dotting and tracing wasn’t exactly cutting, so I guess that doesn’t count.  A bobby pin was my first instrument of choice.  I broke it in half and removed the protective coating that makes it dull.  Then I would use a Swiss army knife, cutting characters onto my thighs.  I then progressed to the elusive box cutter.  I would cut “Samurai” in Kanji (Japanese) on my left thigh and on my right, “Warrior” in Chinese characters.  Kanji was easier, 3 cuts, Warrior took time.  It made me feel in control and in some way, having Samurai Warrior inscribed in my skin was more like an act of affirmation rather than self-injury, staring at it in the middle of night, terrified to go back to sleep because of recurring nightmares that would make any modern day scary movie look like a cartoon.  In the morning I would lie on my bed, with my legs propped up so it would be looking back at me.  Sometimes I would recut, bleeding and repeating it to myself until I believed it, and that I could leave my room and face the outside, this war zone, a world I knew from a very young age was not safe and I had lacked the weapons to survive.  I would stand in the shower and look at those two words trying to feel that I was that…and I would watch the blood from “Samurai Warrior” flow down and mix with the water.  The cuts made my whole body burn.  I would feel it underneath my clothes.  I was numb.  I was dead; a walking corpse.  Blade to skin was the only way I could check to see if I was still alive.