No, my scars aren't tragically beautiful.

Self-harm is something I have battled with since my early teens. It came before my eating disorder; it came before many of the symptoms and illnesses I have battled. I still remember the first time I ever did it; I was so lost, so scared, angry, confused, self-hating. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and that’s when I did it. For a second, I could breathe. But I had no idea what would come to follow.

People think if you self-harm you want to die; but in my experience it was something I did to help me realise I was alive. Starting off as a one off, high stress, pressured, depressed situation… and snowballing into a full-blown entity in itself.

My self harm became more and more serious over the years, to the point I was ending up in A&E every other day for a solid six months. The reasons behind me hurting myself were vast and complicated, and I don’t want to go into that right now. But the experiences I had whilst falling down the rabbit hole of what I was doing became almost worse than anything else.

When I was 15 years old, I had a stone-cold realisation in therapy. The scars that lined my skin, my arms and thighs and stomach; were going to be with me for the rest of my life. For nearly 5 years I had gone to every possible extend to try to cover myself from head to toe, covering any bare skin that may show my shameful secret, desperately trying to not let anyone know the amount of pain I was in. and that’s when it hit me, these arms are mine now.

Ironically, it was when I was admitted to an inpatient unit that I first had the confidence to wear short sleeves. It amuses me how being somewhere where I felt so unsafe, and I was so unwell, helped me to feel slightly more at ease with myself. A huge credit is to the people I met there, who were just like me. Over my admission there, I stopped hating myself for what I had done; but unfortunately, I hadn’t managed to conquer self harm either.

When I was discharged from hospital, I stopped my medication and things spiralled out of control again (note to self, don’t suddenly stop anti-psychotics… not good). I flew back into the cycle of hospital stays; my mind feeling like it was fracturing and breaking under the pressure of everyday life. Readmissions to inpatient facilities, sections, discharges, the cycle went on.

The scars on my body grew in number and in size, to the point I was putting my life at risk. It wasn’t until I was admitted to Glasgow that I managed to start to think about why my brain had decided that hurting myself would in some ways help me. It didn’t come quickly, in fact it got worse before It got better.

In February 2017, after a painfully difficult few weeks, it arose that it had gone too far. In a desperation to cope, I had turned to self-harm. A lengthy a&e trip, with a very unkind doctor, and a week later I had an infection. I brushed it off. Living with self harm means you become very used to these circumstances. But it didn’t go away this time, in fact it got worse. The doctor was called many times over those two weeks, at one point warning me, sternly, that I could lose my hand.

When I hurt myself that time, I didn’t know if I wanted to die or not. I wanted an escape from the pain, but I didn’t know how. Now I had a doctor telling me, I had already crossed the line. I was on 3 different antibiotics and they weren’t working. That week in therapy, I cried. No, I didn’t want to lose my arm, or my hand. No, I didn’t want to feel so ill, I didn’t want to have bandages from finger to shoulder, I didn’t want to deal with any of this.

I told myself this has to stop. And of course, it was not straight forward, in fact it was a helter-skelter of a journey, around and around the same cycles, but occasionally (at first) it started to shift. It wasn’t really until I was on the 1:1 that I was forced to find other ways of coping. Slowly, I did.

The aftermath of self harm isn’t just the physical process of doing it; but its living with the scars (both mentally and physically). Its taken me a good part of two years to be able to walk around in short sleeves and block out the stares, the whispers and smirks. don’t think I don’t see them; the mothers at the swimming pool who thought wouldn’t notice their whispers and looks, the people on the streets that take second-glances. I do, and it hurts. Equally I don’t get angry, because they probably just don’t understand. Wearing short sleeves is something I do easily now, relying on people to be grown up enough to stop themselves after they’ve been staring for more than a minute; or better, just ask me about it instead.

 

My battle against self-harm is complex and exhausting. A year ago, I was with someone who, I presume, was trying to be poetically perfect. That old ‘you’re still beautiful to me’ when my sleeves rolled up and they caught sight of my arms. It did nothing but fill me with anger; because you don’t get to decide for someone if they are beautiful based on whether they have scars. My mum always said this to me; never comment on something that someone cant change. This includes: stretch marks, acne, body shape, your voice, etc. It also includes scars. My scars are not something I am learning to live with; and that’s a tricky journey. Each one reminds me of a battle I lost, they remind me of the trauma, the pain, the misery and the heartache. But this is the thing: they are scars. They are not fresh wounds, I am not bandaged up like a mummy, I’m not having doctors tell me I might lose my arm. They are healed, and I am healing too.

So what can you say to someone about their scars?

Nothing.

Don’t say anything, as you wouldn’t point out a scar from where someone had had surgery, or where their skin was spotty.

And please, please never think that scars are tragically beautiful like those old Tumblr quotes used to say… there is nothing beautiful about self-harm; nothing.

Fi x