Hello, my name is Sarah and I am 16 years old now. I have been struggling through life for 10 years now after a horrible experience ripped me to pieces. When I was six, someone in my family began molesting me and actually, it could have been even earlier than that because when you are a child and something like that happens to you, you don't always remember, which is actually kind of scary. I don't remember why I chose to keep it a secret. The police kept on asking me why I didn't tell anyone until this year and if he had threatened me, but I really can't remember. Anyway ... when i was little i always remembered biting the insides of my cheeks HARD just to do it because it never really bothered me. i always remembered all these people saying "OW! i just bit my cheek and it hurt really bad!" i would always think homme......how come it doesn't hurt when i do it? and then i realized that i had been doing it for so long just to feel it and taste the blood, now I do it all the time, it's a dirty habit I suppose. Since I was so used to being molested almost every day, I didn't see it as something that was a crime and something that was out of the ordinary and I know that sounds strange, but I was just so accustomed to it. Fourth grade was when it finally hit me that something was wrong and he was doing something very wrong because my teacher started talking to the class about that sort of stuff and that if anything like that happened to us, we should tell someone about it. From that moment on, I would think about telling my Mom every single day, but I just couldn't. I knew that if I told her, it would ruin my perfect family picture and it would completely destroy my mother.

That was when I made a promise with myself. I would never tell anyone my secret until that person died so other people wouldn't have to suffer from what I was going through. I started to ignore my feelings as best I could by always putting a smile on my face and acting as though nothing was wrong in my life. In sixth grade, it got really bad and that was when I first started talking to this guy in my class. He had suffered from physical abuse and one time I caught him carving his name in to his arm with a lead pencil. I thought about why it didn't seem to hurt him and I wondered if it would hurt me if I did the same thing. During the end of that year, I tried it and it didn't seem to hurt me either. Soon, whenever I was bored in class, I would take my pencil and just scratch the skin on my left arm near my wrist. Now, if you look at it closely, you can see all the scratches. After that year, I began middle school with no problems and I gave up on the pencil thing and continued my life as being the girl who seemed perfect. But then in eighth grade, I started feeling bad again and I felt as though there was nothing I could do. I didn't want to ruin my family by telling them what was going wrong and I didn't want to continue to suffer any longer. But I just continued to act as though everything was OK and biting my cheek until there was no longer any skin to bite off.

Freshman year was another story. I began to feel even worse than I had ever imagined, struggling to become what I thought was a "normal" girl. It wasn't until that year that I seriously began to think about cutting. My friend Katie who I met in eighth grade seemed the same way, she was hiding something. However, in September of freshman year, I went back to my elementary school with friends for a yearly party, that night I went home with a friend who lives 3 houses down from me. We began to talk about our friend Katie. That was when my friend told me that there WAS something wrong with Katie. My friend told me not to say anything and then she told me that she had been molested by a family member. My hands cupped around my mouth and I couldn't say a word because the same family member who had molested her in her family was the same family member in my family that had been doing the same to me since I was six years old. I wanted so bad to tell her that it happened to me too, but I knew she would make me get help, and I couldn't have that because of my family. But I began to break down, crying every night and such. That year in May was when I turned 15 and my friend Stephanie wrote me a card with memories from sharing 10 years together as good friends, at the end she had explained how she had been feeling depressed lately. When it was her birthday, in July, I wrote her one back, explaining my secret to her, having her promise not to tell a single soul.

She promised. And then in October, I had he courage to tell another friend, my best friend who was the one who showed me this site. She told me that she had also experienced something similar to my situation and she suggested that we write each other letters explaining our pasts. My letter was 8 pages long and it felt so good to finally tell someone the thing that had been eating me alive for so long and it felt so good to cry. In November, I had heard of a lot of other people cutting, to release their pain in a different way, other than verbally. I thought I would try it, just to see what I would get out of it and if it would feel the same way as it did when I did it with a pencil in sixth grade. I grabbed a pair of scissors and began digging into my skin on my arm, thinking of all the things in my past. Today, I still have that long scar from my first cut. When I did it, it felt so good to feel something that barely even hurt, it made me smile inside and get a certain rush, from that moment on, I loved the feeling I got out of it, and I started doing it more often. Plus, it was a way for me to finally cry like I had wanted to for years and it was easier to show my pain than letting others know about it. I started keeping razors in my room and tearing away at my wrists and arms, to feel the comfort and to see the blood. I'm never satisfied until I see the blood dripping and I have at least 3 or 4 cuts to soothe myself and feel calm.

I began to cut almost very night, answering my urges to cut. After a while I realized that it wasn't good, what I was doing so I started wearing rubberbands around my wrists to my classes. I would still cut, but at least I could feel a sense o comfort when I wasn't able to get to a sharp object. That was when I realized just how bad this experience had effected me. Whenever my parents would yell at me, I would cut, whenever I did poorly on an assignment, I would cut, whenever I felt overwhelmed, I would cut, and whenever I would feel stressed and sad, I would resort to cutting. I was crying every night for about 4 months until my parents discovered my secret. My parents found out everything in February, and everything is resolved now and he is in jail for 15 years, 20 if he lives. Today, I go to therapy often, still not telling her everything I'm feeling and I still cut whenever I feel urges or I just need something to soothe my feelings and make me feel comfortable. I keep 2 journals, one to write thoughts and feelings and poems in, and the other is currently my autobiography I am working on. I want others to know what I went through because it was 10 years of my life and I'm only 16. Also, I want other people to be aware of what could happen and if any sings should show up in their daughter, to ask about them so they don't have to suffer as long as I did. I have ODed on pain killers, but not enough to send me to the hospital and I have also pondered about suicide often but never a successful attempt obviously. I still have my thoughts of suicide but I have been able to control myself. One night, I almost swallowed a bottle of listerine because I knew my parents wouldn't be able to hear it and I knew they wouldn't suspect it because they thought I was back to normal. But I don't think it will ever be able to go back to normal, everything has become a part of me. This is who I have become and I can't change myself now, no one can change who they truly are inside, merely the outside. This is only a portion of the story, the rest is too long to tell, and I know this is too long already haha. But I needed to just talk for a while and you will notice that I tend to write a lot because I enjoy it so much