Psyke.org

Alyssa P

I Survived

Copyright, Alyssa P

My name is Alyssa. I’m seventeen years old and I live in New Hampshire?. I had no intention of writing this story but I was doing a search on Yahoo? on a subject that had nothing to do with self injury and something made this website come up. I believe that everything happens for a reason and that I was meant to write this story to help others. So here it is.

The year or so before I turned thirteen was the time I remember the sadness coming. It was like one day I was a normal, happy girl and the next, caught up in so much pain that I didn’t want to live anymore. I know that it’s not the way it happened but it feels like it did. In December of 1999, I turned thirteen and I remember my birthday wish was to get hit by car and die.

Everyone could tell I was unhappy but thought it was nothing serious. Teen angst or whatever. But that Christmas they found out it was more than that. I was hospitalized for a suicide attempt. In the mental hospital that I stayed at, I learned a coping mechanism from other patients, cutting. I’m sure many of you know that it helps relieve the emotional pain by replacing it with physical pain instead. I loved the feeling I had dragging a razor across my arm, stomach, anywhere. The blood was beautiful to me. It was as if the pain left my body with the blood.

Two weeks after I got out of the hospital for the suicide attempt, I was back in there. My parents found out I was cutting and sent me back. When I got out of the hospital, I was okay for a while but the sadness eventually came back. It was like everything started all over again and I didn’t know why. I started cutting again that summer. No one knew. I continued for three years. Sometimes I would break down and scream at my parents and tell them that I still hurt myself. I didn’t mean for things to happen that way but when you’re in so much pain, you tend only to think of yourself and that pain. Cutting is a selfish act, just like suicide. It affects everyone around you whether you think so or not.

Anyway, last year, August 2003, I went too far with my cutting. One night, I got drunk and started cutting my entire body. I cut pretty much everywhere but my face. I will spare the gruesome details and just say everything around me was no longer its orignal color. I got scared and called for my mom. No one were listening because they were all busy. I dialed 911? but hung up because I thought my parents would kill me for calling.

Of course when you dial 911 and hang up, they send police out. Well I got a spectacle — police, an ambulance, and even a fire truck. My parents realized what was going on because the police called the house back before the others arrived. They tried to get me in the bathtub to clean up so I wouldn’t be taken away. I just screamed at them to leave me alone. The EMTs? came in and cleaned me up. They put bandages on what they could. I was taken to the hospital to check my cuts and have any stitches I needed done.

After that, I was sent to another psychiatric hospital. It was in that place though that I decided I wanted to change. It wasn’t the doctors or the programs that helped me. It was myself. I didn’t want to be unhappy anymore. I’d finally come to realize that it really was me that was in charge of my own happiness. A doctor, my parents, or my friends couldn’t make me happy unless I wanted to be and finally, I did.

That night in August was the last time I ever cut myself. It’s been almost a year and yeah, I have had times where I have wanted to cut but I didn’t. It’s self control that you teach yourself because you want something bigger and better than scars. You want happiness. I used to look at my scars and see pain. Now I look at them and see triumph because I had the power and faith in myself to stop. So does everyone else that suffers from self injury. They just have to find it and want to get better. That’s the key to surviving.

 

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