What is Self-Injury? *Graphic Material*

What is self-injury you may be asking yourself?

Well, I have my own personal definition of self-injury, but I'll give you a medical standpoint.
An article by the Mayo Clinic states that self-injury is the act of deliberately harming your own body, such as cutting or burning yourself. It's not meant as a suicide attempt. Rather, self-injury is an unhealthy way to cope with emotional pain, intense anger and frustration.

There are many other ways besides cutting or burning that people use to harm themselves with.  For instance, some people will pull their own hair, scratch themselves, cut with razor blades, burn with fire or chemicals.  Since this blog is about sharing my story I will share a little bit more about myself.  I for instance started out small.  When I first started to injure myself, I would use something as crude as a bent paperclip to scratch the surface of the skin.  I would scratch myself with my fingernails until the skin literally just sluff off. It would look very similar to a rug burn.  But as my emotions became more and more buried, I couldn't help but feel the urge to find something more.  Razor blades scared me, but intrigued me.  I never used a box-cutter style razor blade at first.  I figured out an ingenious way to take apart my shaving razors to get to the little blade inside.  I remember the first time I cut myself with a razor blade after having an emotional day at school.  I remember how it felt dragging it across my skin.  The rush of endorphins that were quickly released gave me such a high and feeling of invincibilty.  But as I soon noticed, that feeling quickly passed and it was back to feeling anxious, depressed, and most of all, guilty for what I had just done. 

It is estimated that 1% of the population self-harms.  So to put that in to scale.  If there are approximately 6 billion people in the world, that means that 60 million people around the world are estimated to self-injure themselves in some way or another.  That's a staggering amount.  When you go to the grocery store or the park, just take a look around.  Chances are that at least one person you come in contact with self-harms.  There could be a possiblity that in your own family that someone close to you that you love does this.

Now I'm sure that you have heard or thought that we who self-harm ourselves are just looking for attention or are trying to attempt suicide.  This is not the case usually.  For most of us that do, we are ashamed of it.  We hide it.  I used to wear long sleeve shirts and pants during the summer months so that no one would see and to avoid the possible ridicule.  It becomes a coping mechanism. 

For those of you out there who do ridicule someone you see with obvious scars, please remember to be respectful.  That person may be going through hell and rude and disrespectful comments may lead that person to inflict more harm to themselves.  And although most people who self-injure don't intentionally try to kill themselves, some injuries can be severe enough that it could lead to death. So just think before you speak.