Scars

A true story about suffering with depression

Don’t judge me until you know me,

Don’t underestimate me until you’ve challenged me,

Don’t talk about me until you’ve talked to me.

While you judge me by my outward appearance, I am silently doing the same to you, even

though there’s a ninety-percent chance that in both our cases, our assumptions are wrong.

I don’t want people to judge me by my scars.

When I created them, I was alone and scared.

I couldn’t control my thoughts or feelings.

Was I worried what people would think of them?

At the time, I only thought about how it felt to tear open the skin on my arm and legs and

watch it bleed.

I started cutting myself when I was about 14.

My Dad died in June that year.

Nothing seemed right anymore.

My view of life had changed dramatically.

I felt so lost without him and was terrified of losing someone close to me again.

I don’t know what made me think that hurting myself was the answer.

I hurt myself but also pushed away many people that loved me, so at the time, I hurt them too.

Nothing mattered to me anymore.

This self-inflicted pain was the only thing I felt in control of.

My life was out of control and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop bad things from

happening.

…I blamed myself…

I’ve been cutting and burning myself for a long time now.

First I used tweezers and hair straighteners and then razor blades, cigarettes and scissors.

Whenever I felt stressed or upset, or not in control, I’d resort to hurting myself.

It became an addiction.

I felt the need to hurt myself again and again and eventually, I craved the feeling that it gave

me.

I hurt myself because I hated myself.

When you see me, I look like a perfectly normal teenager.

You’ll find me on my phone a lot and I don’t usually find it difficult to form my own opinion

about things.

…But…

I hated the fact that I didn’t feel happy,

I had no energy to do the things that I once enjoyed,

I hated how badly I was doing at school,

I felt like a failure.

For a long time, I would look at my scars and think that I was a failure for doing these things to

myself.

Tearing open my skin was leaving a permanent trace of self-hatred.

All of this went on for a few years and I got a lot worse before I got better.

I tried so hard to do everything right but instead, I could feel everything slipping more and more

out of my control.

I ended up starting to smoke because it was the only thing that could make me relax and for a

short moment, forget all my troubles.

I found it difficult to think about my future because I didn’t want to be a part of it.

When I first started smoking, it was because I didn’t know what else to do.

It seemed to be the only thing that I could rely on.

Many young people tend to smoke because of social pressures and when people first saw me

smoke, I could feel them judging me and my actions instead of thinking about the reasons I was

doing so.

Smoking helped me to take a step back and think about my life and I enjoy nothing more than

sitting peacefully smoking in my back garden when the moon and the stars are out.

The daily pressures

that I faced didn’t

only cause me to

smoke, nor only

make me think

about what the

reason for me being

here was…

With all the self-inflicting hatred that I was putting upon myself, I found it difficult to eat and

stomach anything because of the pain I was causing.

Both my Mum and my brother were very worried about me and I physically couldn’t live with

what I was doing, even though, I couldn’t stop.

On a good day, I would manage to eat roughly one quarter of a piece of toast, five grapes and

two mouthfuls of pasta.

Many girls my age would do anything to be thin, but at this point, I was proud of myself when

I gained weight.

Eventually, I managed to talk to my Mum about how I felt inside and together we saw a

Doctor and went to appointments with an adolescent mental health service but I didn’t feel

like it was going to work – I felt as though I was wasting everybody’s time.

That was when I decided to pretend to everyone that I was getting better and that I didn’t need

help anymore.

These feelings were controlling my life.

I found it difficult to get out of bed, I’d skip college and not see my friends because I felt so

terrible. I thought that every single person I counted as a friend hated me so I distanced myself

because I didn’t want to be a burden on their lives.

All of my self confidence and hope that I had for my life was taken away from me when I lost

my Dad. He was one of the only people I could rely on and a person that had such high hopes

for me because I was his daughter.

He was the one person that would always give me a hand when I was down and would always

be able to pick me back up again.

I was eventually put onto anti-depressants and started psychotherapy because I told myself

that I had to stop this and could no longer deal with what I was doing.

I feel as though I have come a long way from how I used to feel, but there are still times I can’t

seem to shake the hatred I feel for myself and the anxiety that I’m worthless and irritating

others.

I used to want to die.

But now, I feel that life should be pleasurable.

Life is too short to care about what people think and it’s important to enjoy what you want to

do, because you could be gone in an instant and you can’t wish your life away planning to die.

Sometimes, I look at my

left arm and it makes me

sad that I did what I did

to myself, but at the time,

I really struggled to cope

with my emotions.

Now, as I compare both

of my arms, I view the left

one as my past of self

harm and self hatred and

view my right arm as my

future – I intend to treat

it as a blank canvas.

My scars represent a

difficult stage in my life,

but now, the scars that

were once scabs have

healed and now that they

have, I never ever want to

do that to myself again.