i am 21 years old, i have depression and generalised anxiety disorder. i am a relatively shy person, until you get to know me. i had a real tough time growing up. i was molested at 7 and throughout my childhood had to watch my alcoholic father abuse my mother, and divorce when i was 11. only for my mother to remarry, to a drunken pedophile, who would abuse my mother and sexually abuse my younger sister and i. i have a loving fiance, but our relationship is under strain due to my depression, and i don't really have any friends i can turn to, because they have all turned away from me. so now you know a slice of my background...here goes

the first time i hurt myself, i was 14. it started off with me getting safety pins, and scratching my arms. at that age i didn't know that what i was doing was self harm, or that other people did it. i never drew blood with the safety pin, and the marks usually went away after a day or two.
at that age i had a friend who would join me in engraving things into our wrists, usually pentagrams or upside down crucifixes. we didn't see any harm in it. but thinking back now a couple of my other friends were worried, and wished we wouldn't do it.

as high school went on, my depression became worse, i started smoking, and smoking weed, at school, i lost the friends i had, and made new ones with the smokers and stoners, missing out on a couple of days of school a week to go to friends house to get stoned.

i would write disturbing poetry about death and killing, mostly about those who had hurt me in school, i had many journals filled with my black poetry, and would never dream of showing anyone. by this time i was about 16, and i was still using safety pins, simply because i didn't have access to anything else.

time went by, my drug taking and drinking had increased, i found myself a boyfriend (My now fiance) who didn't know that i smoked or took drugs, or any of it. i failed year 12, and went on to do year 13, where miraculously i passed by the skin of my teeth.
i would hide my cuts from my boyfriend with arm warmers and home made arm socks, he occasionally found them, but at this stage my cuts weren't anything to be too worried about.

so last year we moved out into a house with 3 other friends. these friends weren't close, and over the course of a few weeks i soon found out that these friends cut themselves also. by this time i had moved away from pins and was using sharp kitchen scissors, and pulling razors out of leg shavers. ahh the fine presence of blood was upon me. i was smoking weed every single day, taking painkillers and drinking myself into oblivion. so much so that 2 of my house mates moved out because they couldn't handle me. so we found another house mate and me and my fiance took the room with the en suite....bad idea!

one day a couple of weeks later we visited my fiances parents house..and i came across a packet of brand new razor blades. i was in heaven. i secretly bagged the razors and we went home. i felt like i had won the lottery, oh the damage i could do with these metal kisses. so one day when i was the only one home (i had lost my job, due to depression) and all my other housemates were at work i went into this new environment, being my very own bathroom (en suite) with shining white tiles, and a sea of possibility. i put on the song i had found myself cutting to (Knife Prty - the deftones) and i proceeded in getting myself stoned.

i sat on the en suite floor with the music blaring and my stolen treasure of 5 sparkling new razors in my hand. i took one out of the plastic casing and looked at the razor. 'this will do perfectly' i thought. i offered my wrist in a forbidden ritual and proceeded to drag the razor across my scarred skin. the blazing white, of the cut, then the intense deep red was all i saw as my life's essence trickled down my arm and splashed onto the pristine tiles.

i was addicted.

again and again i cut my arms, more and more blood each time.
i almost passed out because my body had gone into shock from blood loss, but i kept cutting
how much ease and precision the razor brought, so little effort to draw so much blood, unlike my previous attempts with scissors and pins.

finally i was done. i sat on the tiled, blood splatted floor admiring my handy work, the work of the devil. how beautiful it was to see the floor tainted, like my soul, i had control, for once in my life i had control. i didn't want to clean it up...i never do... it feels wrong for me to clean the blood away, be it on my arms, or on the floor, it is a reminder of what i have been though. what i have SURVIVED through,

and i never want to wash it away