I don’t know why I can’t stop.  It’s like when you have a cut in your mouth, or you burn your tongue and just keep feeling it and wincing and then feeling it again; or when you pick a scab off before it’s ready and it bleeds, but you keep picking anyway.  It hurts, but it fascinates me at the same time.  It hurts, but it’s worse not to remember how much it hurts.  I need to feel the pain even though it rips me apart inside.  I need it sometimes to know that I’m alive, sometimes to fuel myself into moving forward and continuing on the path toward healing.  Sometimes that step back is the shove forward I need.

I keep thinking about this post at Good With Cheese, and about how true and honest it was, and how much it touched me to read it.  How I stepped back from myself and thought about my weight as just another way of hurting myself. 

The other day I cut myself again, sat in my bedroom sobbing and digging at my inner elbow, the soft flesh there, with a pair of scissors, because that’s all I could find.  Every time I bend my arm now, it hurts, it hurts far worse than the cutting did, and it’s both a reminder of how much better I feel this very second than I did at that moment and a talisman against the psychic pain, like a button I can press to remind myself of my body and how much it hurts.  If you’re not a cutter, this probably makes no sense.  The cutting, it’s a weird cycle.  You hurt, you hurt so bad it feels like you’ll burst out of your brain and you need to stop the explosion, and that physical sensation brings you both back into yourself and also out of yourself enough that you deflate instead of popping.  All these reasons?  They ring true.  There is the punishment for being such an awful person, the feeling of being alive, the feeling of control- but there’s also the comfort afterward, the application of Neosporin and band-aids.  There’s the knowledge of holding a weird secret on your skin, under your clothes where no one can see.

I didn’t want this post to be about cutting, and I’m  not trying to get sympathy for it.  It’s a behavior I’ve struggled with for a long time now, since I first did it when I was 13.  I stopped for years, but now I need something, I need the release, I need something real to hold onto.  It works for now, and though it’s sort of adolescent and embarrassing to admit to doing it, it ties into what I wanted to say about that post I referenced above.

Namely, today is my seminar appointment, and today work had a breakfast celebration, and today instead of cutting I reverted back to the old way of hurting myself, the one that I think is the worst for me, the one I’m trying so hard to break now – I ate a whole lot.  Yesterday and today, actually.  And now I want to go cut myself and cry, to punish myself more for punishing myself in that way.  The whole cycle is shitty and it’s heartbreaking, and I don’t know why I keep doing, why I can’t stop myself. 

Today I keep looking at a certain profile on a website, a profile of someone who is part of the heartbreak for me right now, and I feel that same burnt tongue pain, that same feeling of poking and prodding at myself to see how bad it really is.  It’s bad.  Every click makes it worse, every comment I read makes me shake a little more, brings more butterflies of fear into my stomach.  I don’t know why I can’t stop.  I don’t want to hurt like this anymore, I don’t want to be some stupid adolescent girl who can’t grow up, can’t stop tearing herself down, can’t control herself.  I’m going to make an appointment with my shrink soon, I think, because I can’t continue the way I have been, I can’t keep crying and cutting and smoking and eating or not eating, can’t stay at these extremes forever.  You can’t live like this for long.