When I was fourteen (I'm currently seventeen), I was spending a large amount of time perusing the a.s.h. Methods File (www.xanthia.com/ash), hoping for some good information to help me decide how to kill myself. Being unable to acquire a gun, lethal drugs or access to a high rooftop, I decided I'd slash my wrists (yeah, I know, it's not a very good method). So, I stole a steak-knife from my parents' cutlery drawer and began to "practice" on my forearm, in order to become acclimated to deliberately cutting my own skin. At first I shrank away from the pain, but as I kept going, slashing here and there, I began to feel a kind of pleasure in place of pain. As I filled out the rest of my arm with tiny little cuts (not much worse than scratches from a cat's claws, really), that strange pleasure evolved into a sort of ecstasy. All my life, I have only been able to derive pleasure from that which hurts me (i.e. smoking, drug abuse, half-remembered alcohol binges, etc.), and in cutting myself I found the single most direct way of achieving it I could imagine. This is how it all started.

A couple weeks went by and eventually my mother discovered my little hobby. Like most other people who self-mutilate, I inevitably found myself in a psychiatrist's office. He had hardly even spoken to me before writing me a prescription for Prozac. Of course, I was told that if I just took my pills, everything would be alright. Not surprisingly, the Prozac did nothing but make me irritable and deepen my depression. I continued to mutilate myself, and by now I not only owned my own set of razor blades, but also carried them around with me. For a while I avoided detection by switching from my forearm to my upper arm, but soon enough I cut myself so badly that the resultant bloody mess was impossible to conceal. The incident earned me a week in the adolescent psych ward.

Over the next couple of months, I was being switched from one antidepressant to the next, on a fairly regular basis. The all-encompassing despair that this neurochemical mind-fuck brought on is beyond words. I had already had extremely negative results from Prozac, but apparently my psychiatrist's strategy was to throw every pill he could my way as if I were some sort of medical experiment. Eventually the only thoughts running through my head at any given moment were of suicide. I gathered about fifty grams of worth of prescription drugs (my own and my family's leftovers) and downed them in handfuls. All I remember after that is saying goodbye to my cat, lying down in my bed, and then waking up to a fit of vomiting and seizures. Immediately thereafter I lost consciousness, and thankfully I was not aware when they stuck that goddamn tube down my throat and suctioned out my stomach. Needless to say, I went for another visit to the psych ward, this time for three weeks.

When I emerged again, I began to cut with a passion. I would slash myself multiple times daily, until my upper arm was literally covered in scars (and, of course, it still is). As it turned out, one of my close friends at the time turned out to be a cutter as well, although I hadn't realized it before. When the secret was out, we would even cut together.

On the day before Thanksgiving, about four months after I began to self-mutilate, I left school early, went out to a (very) nearby grove of trees, pulled out my pack of razor blades, and went wild on my wrists. I was bleeding profusely, but my goal was death, so I looked for another area to cut. I settled on the only large blood vessel I could find near to my skin, on the inside of my right elbow. Now the blood was flowing beautifully, and I laid down and relaxed on the ground.

As the hours ticked by, I was still alive, and as a result very frustrated. I figured my blood flow was being reduced by the cold, so I tried to stand up and get some circulation going, only to find it impossible. I vomited (massive blood loss causes some nasty nausea), collapsed, and settled on crawling. To be exact, I wasn't crawling so much as dragging my half-dead body around by my elbows. I had intended on returning to the grove of trees, but I only had enough impetus left for a one-way trip. I was face-down in the grass, unable to move, when a car came by and spotted me. I was "rescued" and woke up in intensive care, alive, but too weak to move, full of tubes and able to eat nothing but Jell-O. I found out that I had lost approximately sixty percent of my blood volume before being spotted, and despite my miserable physical state, all I could think of was how I had failed even when death would have been certain if I hadn't fucked up and tried to move.

After a week (or possibly two, my recollection is a little hazy) in intensive care, I went once again to the psych ward, this time for a month. After that, I was shipped off to a group home for a year. While in the group home, I still self-mutilated, now with a disposable scalpel my roommate had lifted from the doctor's office instead of my razors. Once again, I actively and openly self-mutilated with another person, which I believe must be a rare occurrence in the first place. Towards the end of my stay I stopped cutting altogether.

Now it's been three years since all that happened, and it's all coming back again. I felt what it was like to be a whole person, perhaps for the first time ever, in the interim. Still, what goes up must come down, and I am obviously no exception. I'm back to my old ways, slashing just to feel the rush of pain and the satisfaction I can only feel by causing myself harm. And once again I feel myself teetering at the brink of death, getting more and more ready to take the plunge. I've tried to at least put off suicide until I turn eighteen (so I could buy a twelve-gage shotgun and do it right for once), but a part of me wants to repeat the past and bleed to death. The three months I'll have to wait before I can legally buy a gun seem so far away that the thought of bearing the pain I feel that much longer is intolerable. So, that's my story.