Self Harm.  An addiction.

I awoke to the sound of seagulls, we were on holiday again. It was a strange awakening.

 A dog barked somewhere, I could hear my dad banging about as he lifted the bed in the other room and pushed it back onto the wall of our caravan. I looked around the tiny space that was by bedroom. I remembered the row last night with my mother, another argument over something and nothing, she had blamed me again, it was always my fault, I was bad, I was the evil one. It had been the same for as long as I could remember, the evil inside me wasn’t going to go away. My grandfather first put it there with his tickling and touching games, my mother beat me when I told her about him, she said I was evil, a little liar. Then, when I was thirteen years old and had been raped by one of my mother’s men friends, I was the evil one again. Men didn’t do such things to nice girls, of course, they could tell the difference, there were girls who did and girls who didn’t. Bad girls did. Bad girls wanted sex. It had to be true, my mother had said so.

I didn’t crave a cup of coffee this morning, didn’t even want a cigarette, but my eyes flicked around the tiny room and rested on the top drawer of my little bedside table. I sat up and reached for that drawer. I opened it slowly and beneath my diary, an old magazine and my make up bag there lay the tool I was looking for, a small shiny razor blade. I felt and looked dreadful, the mirror told me that. I wanted to cry, needed to feel something, but feelings of any kind eluded me these days. I was sixteen years old and unable to feel emotion, I needed to feel something, pain would do.

Wrapping my old dressing gown around my body, I left the safety of my tiny room and nodded to my mother who cooked breakfast in the caravan kitchen. She looked smug, she often did these days. She had her own way again; I had been watching her rolling around the hall at home with Danny, my boyfriend. She had her teeth into him, as she usually did with men, she controlled him just as she did my father, but she didn’t have to sleep with him. Not her own daughter’s boyfriend, surely that was the ultimate betrayal, but then, he didn’t have to agree to it, wasn’t he as bad as she was? Not according to the scene she had created the night before, no! I was the liar, I was the evil one and my father chose to believe her.

I closed the door to the caravan behind me and made my way to the showers. ****** hidden in my innocent plastic wash bag, hidden with the Camay soap, the shampoo, toothpaste and deodorant. All part of my daily routine. No one thought much about a girl buying razor blades back in the 1960s, surely she only used them to shave her pits and legs.

The showers at the caravan site were old and well used. The tiled walls were splattered with lime scale and spotted with mildew. A middle aged woman smiled at me as I opened the door to one of the cubicles, she looked kind, and for a moment I wished my mother was like her. I stripped off and turned on the shower, shivering as my body acclimatised to the lukewarm water. Then, lathering myself all over, I began to wash my hair. For a few moments I enjoyed myself, savouring the creamy lather, taking pleasure in washing the dirt from my hair and body, washing away the filth put there so long ago by the man who called himself my grandfather. But the pleasure wasn’t enough; I needed to feel more, to feel pain. I mean, wasn’t pain the ultimate pleasure? Hadn’t pain and love fitted together for me for most of my life?

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I didn’t want to stop but knew I had to. No one must know. I must not go over the top as I had done before, no hospitals, no stitches, no psychiatrists who ummed and arred and shook their heads while writing down words like ‘personality disorder’ and ‘inadequate’ in my records. I had to stop. The tears ran down my cheeks and mingled with the water from the shower, but I had to stop, no one must know, the scars must be hidden.

I hid my blood soaked towel in my bag before I returned to the caravan. My arms were neatly wrapped in thick rolls of toilet paper and hidden by my dressing gown sleeves. I sat down at the table and smiled at my dad.

“Fancy a cup of tea, love?” he asked me. Your mum’s cooked some breakfast, want some?”

“No thanks, a coffee might be nice though.”

I reached for the packet of cigarettes on the windowsill and placed one between my lips. I lit it and inhaled the smoke deeply into my lungs before blowing upwards. Folding my arms around my body I closed my eyes. My arms were sore, but I’d had another fix of pain. Surely I must be free of the evil by now; all that bleeding must have been releasing it. But it was building up again, I could feel it already, it burned like a fire somewhere deep inside me. I know that in a day or so I would have to do this all over again.

That was more than 40 years ago. I no longer self harm, haven’t done so for a very long time and have no desire to most of the time. I can’t say how or why I stopped, I honestly don’t know why, it just kind of happened as I learned to deal with my past life. I stopped it almost unconsciously, quite unlike the conscious effort I had to make to stop smoking. Perhaps for some reason, I no longer feel the need to harm myself, but when the pressure builds up, when life plays its usual cruel games and throws the mud in my face, I still feel the same old twinge of self guilt, it just HAS to be my fault and I could easily go back to my old ways and pick up my old addiction once again. But for some reason, I don’t, I might think about that razor blade or knife, but I don’t use it. The addiction is still there, like an alcoholic who wants a drink, the thought of attacking myself never completely goes away. I seem to have just learned not to give into it now, but once addicted, always addicted. The desire to do it will always pop up from time to time, it’s not going to disappear, I just know I have to always control it. And I do.