Beauty, money, power, a house, a car, roller shutters, a nice pair of boots, the right shade of lipstick, a beautiful woman...
They're all things.
That's what I was, a thing, someone's thing.
I remember the day I realized it had to stop, the complete spiral of self destruction I had existed on for over five years. It was the day I woke up with my face bruised, scars all over my body and fifty thousand dollars in my bank account.

I guess my story of a protracted relationship with knives, razors and anything that burns began the first time my cousin tried to touch me. I was 19 and he was three years older and my best friend. He was my confidant, he was the only member of my family who seemed to understand my long standing battle with depression, and the feeling that I was never good enough. He was seeing my best girl friend at the time, my physical opposite. She was tall, thin, beautiful, pale and dark haired. I was little, stocky, blonde and dark. She was winter, I was summer.

We took a trip to Melbourne to see some mutual friends and while we were there he tried it on, he tried to extend our relationship from the one of family love I'd always thought we had. I remember feeling like I wanted to be sick the whole way home while I listened to them fight. Not long after we got back he started his tirade, "you're fat, you're ugly, who'd ever want you? Why can't you be more like (insert name)?" I guess around then I started burning myself, nothing real serious mind, just after he'd let loose on me in one way or another I'd get a cigarette and let it rest on my skin until the pain would kind of go away.

It obviously freaked me out, and I took my freaked out self to Darwin with sixty dollars in my pocket and a swirl of pure poison in my mind. I started sleeping around then, I mean really sleeping around. No protection, no names. Fucking on beaches with guys I would have never given the time of day to six months before, let alone my body.
I came back, broke and broken, only to find that some things hadn't changed. He pursued me more then ever. I started seeing one of his friends, someone older then me by five years with a drinking/drug problem to boot. I guess I thought, "you can't touch me now."

I was wrong. Not only did nothing change but I found myself in what was the first of three really abusive relationships. I learnt from this one that bruises fade, but the words, the part where the man you loves tells you you're a slut, you're fat, you'll never amount to anything... that's what sticks.

I ended up pregnant, and despite everything my body told me I had an abortion. I realized that keeping the baby would tie me to someone who would never stop in his mission to take the life out of my eyes.

I left him when my decisions and his behavior made me fall into a black hole of despair, when I got so sick from complications that I couldn't move, when after a year of living in my pocket he wasn't there. I really wanted to kill myself, and had a go, but got caught out and the backlash was pretty furious, and not just from him. None of it mattered then . My baby was gone.


Cut to three months later. I've escaped, but not really. I'm with someone new, who thinks I'm too fat (at about 50 kilos and 5'2). After my cousin, after my ex, he kept telling me I wasn't as good as the other girls, I listened. I stopped eating, started walking everywhere. Lost ten kilos. I looked like I was twelve, only skinnier. I got to be thin, Ally McBeal thin, only I now really hated my body. All I could see was how fat I was. It made it easy to punish myself with burns, and very occasionally knives or razors, but never very deep, just enough to bleed.

The night things changed I was fairly drunk. My partner had gone to bed and I was drinking with our friends when he got up and released his usual darts of venom at me. I was too fat, I was too loud, I was a slut, I was ugly. He lived with a guy who kept an immaculate kitchen, with immaculately kept knives. I took one to my wrist, but this time sharper then before, harder then before. I bled, I bled like crazy and it felt so good I wanted to keep fucking bleeding forever.
Two months later it was my drug. Every time he'd try to cheat (he was never very good at picking up), every time I'd hear why I was so wrong compared to other girls I'd take a knife, or a razor, or a cigarette, or even a fucking piece of tin and I'd hack a hole in myself. I have one scar on my upper arm from that time, it's my worst one I own. It's on my right arm, about half way down between my elbow and my shoulder, on the visible part, right out there. It's about two inches long now, and close on half a centimeter wide, all purple and white six years later. When I did it he was screaming at me, telling me how he could never love me because I wasn't good enough. I cut, but I cut really well. I bled everywhere, through his sheets and bed covers, I stained his mattress. There was blood all over me, all over him, all over the room and through the kitchen. He was crying, and I felt complete.

I know the exact thought that ran through my head as I ran the knife over my skin. I thought, "see how little I mean to you all, I mean even less to myself. I can be gone. See how much you hate my body, I hate it even worse, I CAN be gone."

About a month later we were in a car accident together. He sustained a displaced hip. I broke nine ribs and shattered my right wrist. I passed the scar off as part of that accident, when I finally got out of intensive care. It was the source of my fifty thousand dollars, insurance payout. However that would not eventuate for another two years. At that point I was just numb, watching an endless stream of my friends drift in and out of the hospital to visit, a stream of friends that did not include him.
He left me for another girl a week later.

Unfortunately for me he came back, and I was stupid enough to take him back. We went up north together, Broome this time. However what could have been the biggest disaster I had ever been a part of, it wasn't. I want to add this part in because it's my first period of not cutting. Despite the fact that we were living together we barely saw each other due to our work hours. I made friends up there, he didn't. People took to me, I was funny, and little, and smart, and cute as a fucking button. I started remembering the me I had been before all this, before my cousin, before him. Due to a lack of food for close on a year I was also tiny. People like tiny girls, I guess they're not very threatening.

It didn't matter though, it wasn't enough. It would never have been enough. He left me again, or he actually kicked me out of the flat we shared so he could try his luck with a girl from his work.
I flew home the next day and found my addiction again within a month.

This time I chose my upper legs. Didn't bleed as much, and the scars were easier to conceal. Ended up with another guy, but it never really clicked, in part because I was always hiding the fresh wounds on my legs, in part because he kept finding them. He also had problems, namely his crack whore ex with whom he was still in love. Things had been much worse for me though. For the most part I was pretty okay at this time. I was living with another cousin, one of my best friends. There's nothing quite as healing at times then just plain girl type fun, and we had heaps.

Anyway, the current man eventually left me, went back to his ex. I missed him for about five seconds then got together with the next man in my life, the one who put bruises on my face.

He was yet another friend of my cousins, the not-so-pleasant one. He had come from abuse, he was big and he was dumb. However I was dumber, I thought I could save him. He was jealous and controlling. He hated the close friendships I had with the other guys we hung around with. He hated my past and my partying ways. He believed that I needed to start acting like a decent submissive woman. I should have realized what he was like. I'd known his ex. She was this beautiful, intelligent girl who would sit at his side like a doll, never speaking, never out of turn, never questioning, always obeying.
I was not like that, despite my past. He tried to brake me down. I'm talking being woken up at three in the morning because I'd moved in my sleep and being physically thrown out of the bedroom. I'm talking being screamed at because I refused to give him the last seven dollars in my purse. I'm talking being in the car with him and suddenly he's doing 180 through the hills because I got a text message from a male friend of mine. And like all the others I'm talking put-downs, all the fucking time.

I started cutting again. I don't think he minded, it was just something to confirm in his mind that by not wanting to be treated like crap that I was crazy. I would wander from room to room in the house we shared just wanting to crawl out of my skin. Feeling like if I had to stay in my body, in my life that I was going to just go out of my head with grief. My life was over. I felt used up, wasted and so very old.
I was twenty-five.
In thinking that nothing could make the situation any worse I must have invoked the gods of fucking-you-over. I fell pregnant, for a second time. This time when I had an abortion I felt very little at first. I was practically empty anyway. But after a few weeks his continuous cruelty began to wear. I came home from a girls night out very early one morning and unleashed. He climbed out of bed and went to absolute pieces on my little body.
The next day I woke up with bruises all over my face and a fifty thousand dollar check in the mailbox. I realized that things had to change.

I got counselling, I stayed as far away from men as I find physically possible. I certainly went nowhere near anything that even resembled a relationship. I went back to study. I spent a lot of time alone in my head, read a lot of books and tried to get back to the me who I really was, the me I used to be. She was still there, a little older, a little jaded, much much stronger. But I found her. It's still a struggle, but she's strong. I'm strong.

I look back now, and realize some things about myself and my cutting. I'm not a very competitive person. I don't feel the need to prove myself better or worse then anyone. People are all different, I know the things that make me different from most people my age are the things I like most within myself.
I don't want a house, or a car, or to be physically beautiful, or to have the right shade of lipstick. I want to cry at sunsets and spend money on charities I can't afford and drive the people I love really crazy with mini lectures on globalization and the plight of the third world.
I hate being told how I should be different, be married, be a mother, have a career. Just because society tells us that this is the only option doesn't mean that I have to buy into it. I decided long ago that the trappings of our society are not necessarily for me.
I hate being told I should forget my past because it's "not as bad as you think."

You weren't there. How could you know?

I hate being made to feel like my life is a default. I work hard. I read, I play, and I fucking think all the time. I battle with a demon every day and so far I'm managing to win.
I can get over: Incest, depression (that still goes on) , three abortions, being hit, being cheated on, being told I'm worthless for years, multiple broken bones (there's yet more), anxiety, an eating disorder and anything else life still decides to throw my way.

I'm smarter then I ever thought I was, I'm funny, I'm pretty cute for a chick whose hitting thirty, I live by my own rules and I sleep easy at night.
I'm doing something that really makes me happy, that will hopefully lead to a pretty good (I mean fulfilling, not money making) career. I have the love of a man who for the most part makes me feel incredible and whose pretty incredible himself. I have great friends and I'm really close to my family. I have the capability to empathize, and to my mind what could be more important then that? I would not give any of that up for a second.

But I still have my scars. They are my constant reminder of what I've managed to survive through. I refuse to regret any of them, they are as much a part of me as my blue eyes. Each one represents something, a failure, a win.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

To regret is to deny the things that you've learnt.

I will never regret anything, especially my scars.

(Since this I have cut myself again, but got my butt into counselling again and dealt with the Robbie thing aya!)