It was about a year ago that my friends and I found the painful truth. Near tears, almost yelling at my friend, "Don't you dare hurt yourself again, no, please, no". I realized that the very same friend could be heard yelling the very same thing at me. We we're hypocrites. We had joined the world of the cutters.
To see a friend in pain was enough to make us cry, yet none of us could stop doing stuff to our own selves. It wasn't as if we had started cutting because other people were, most of us started with out knowing that any of our friends were also cutters. It was only after we became part of that world that we could sense it in the way our friends talked and acted. That they were part of it too.
By mid spring last year, over half of my close friends were cutters. There was no logic to it, we didn't ask for logic. All most of us could say about cutting was that we hated it when our friends hurt themselves, yet there was no way we could stop even ourselves. Indeed, many of us couldn't even want to stop. But we continued to help each other, continued to understand each other, continued to pour out emotion to each other. Sometimes it made it better, sometimes it made it worse, after all, we weren't feeling our pain, but the pain
of the whole world. For every new scar that appeared on a friend's skin could make us feel ten times worse. Enough worse that we would end up cutting ourselves.
For nearly all SIers are hypocrites, and once you think about it long enough, it begins ot make sense. We care so much about our friends that it hurts, we care more about our friends than we do ourselves. To see a friend cut is to see a person who has much value have his/her life ruined. Yet to see oneself cut is just, well, who-cares, its part of life.
This can be attributed to many things, and from my point of view the two most major things are: The intense love for either individual friends or the world; And the feeling of such low self worth that it doesn't matter what happens to oneself. This combination of ideas leave us helpless against the power of hypocrisy. We'll do anything to help ease the pain of those we care about, and as the pain of others forms around us, we'll cut ourselves to forget the pain (or for other reasons, that is one of the least constant things among cutters). Many of us are among the ones who, though having no desire to die, would gladly end our lives if it would just diminish the pain a few of our friends are in.
In the end, it was this very same love for others that helped us through. For many of us did not want to by hypocrites, but at the same time knew that we would never stop caring about other people who hurt themeless. This left us with one option. It wasn't an easy thing to do, but it was really the only choice. To stop being a hypocrite, we had to stop hurting ourselves. Even more than that, it was clear that our self injury was hurting those we cared so much
about. Gradually, using this reasoning, we were able to use the love we had for
each other to pull ourselves out of this mess.
Which means that this story of cutters actually has a happy ending, unlike the stories of so many other people like us. By the end of summer, all of us had managed to stop hurting ourselves. It wasn't easy, but we did it. Many of us, (me included) still care for others with a passion, but this is no longer a reason to hurt ourselves, but rather a reason to go and try to improve the world. To help other people, to help end pain, and most of all, help other people conquer the same problem that all of us had to face.
**OK, so that last paragraph is a lie. Most of my friends haven't stopped hurting ourselfs, only one of my friends has complelty succeeded in stopping, and he still wants to. However, for all (I think, i hope) of my friends it has gotten better, and I think that most of my friends are like me in the sense that we have basically stopped. |
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