This is how a Canadian show saved my life. Degrassi was one of the many, many shows I wasn’t allowed to watch. I also wasn’t allowed to go to movie theaters, not even to watch Winnie the fucking Pooh Bear. So because I knew my parents were simply wrong on that account, I decided I should throw out all the other rules too. Degrassi was on TeenNick so I saw all the commercial while watching regular Nick shows (also wasn’t allowed to watch Spongebob or Drake & Josh). So yeah, if case you didn’t know Degrassi is basically a high school soap drama, but shows real life problems and situations. It’s not Disneyfied to always have a magical happy ending. There’s a school shooting. Someone dies. The school mourns and it shows every stage of grief. A girl gets pregnant. We watch her struggle between choosing to keep the baby or have an abortion and how her friends and family react. So it is pretty hard to find a tv character that you can relate to 100%, but with so many characters I was able to relate to a few different characters that covered all my major bases. There were two bases that were not covered anywhere else in my limited knowledge of the whole world. One, there was a gay guy. Now days that’s not a huge surprise. Maybe not on Disney channel, but most shows now have at least one token gay character. Even Friends had a Lesbian wedding. But here was a gay guy about my age who struggled with coming out. His parents were homophobic. They kicked him out when they found out he was gay. I had that fear from the beginning. So that meant a lot to me to see someone facing the same real world shit I was dealing with. And they even follow his story with the all the normal struggles of dating. The same things you see on every show with straight people. It’s really not that different. It was refreshing to see that I have a chance at finding love and all its pain and suffering just like everyone else.
The second and more time sensitive and extremely controversial thing was seeing someone on screen self-harm. I hadn’t tried that yet.
I’ve attempted suicide too many times to remember, but other than the baseball bat to the head to get dumber, I hadn’t inflected pain on myself on purpose. The baseball bat thing wasn’t for the pain, it was my “science” experiment to change what I didn’t like about myself. So I did that while other kids had a makeover. Anyways, I’ve heard about cutting, but I was too afraid to try it. I didn’t know what I was doing or how that would work. I knew I could kill myself by slitting my wrist or my neck or stabbing into my thighs or gut. But I didn’t know how much pressure or force I would need or how sharp the knife had to be, and I wasn’t strong, and from all my failed attempts I knew the body and mind would instantly fight back or hold back. So if I tried and failed with a knife, I would defiantly bleed but I might not die, and if someone found me, then my secret would be out. And I didn’t want to burden anyone else with my pain. But I never thought of cutting myself just to cut myself. Now on this flip side I still didn’t know the physics and I might accidentally cut too deep and either die when maybe I didn’t want to quite yet or bleed too much and make a mess I couldn’t cover up, and again no more secret. But on the show I saw a girl who I related to because she was “emo” and I was following her storyline and I shared her pain. I remember the scene were the pain was just too much, much like how I often felt, but she didn’t use a knife. She used what was on the desk. A compass (math not maps) and scissors. I knew those were sharp but I didn’t know they were sharp enough to “do the job.” So the next time I was in emotional despair I did what she did. Cut how she cut. At first I wasn’t applying enough pressure so I just felt the cold steel against my skin and that felt good too. But I adjusted and tried again and it felt amazing. Like all my pain was bleeding out of this one little cut on my arm that was barely bleeding. It was cathartic. The release that I needed that wasn’t permanent. And I covered it up like she did. Long sleeves became my best friends. It took about a week for it to heal. So I would cut once a week so I wouldn’t have too many scars to hide. And most didn’t actually leave scars. I still wasn’t cutting nearly deep enough. It was almost like bigger sized paper cuts. I’ll save the stories and more details for another post. But yeah, I learned how to cut by watching tv, and it saved my life. It by no means was the healthiest way to deal with my problems, but it was the only way that I could. And every time I cut was a time I released some pressure so that suicide wasn’t my first option as it had been for a few years at this point. And maybe I could have gotten by without cutting, but maybe I would have finally been successful at a suicide attempt. I was getting older and smarter and more creative. I channeled all that into finding the best angle to cut at, how much pressure for how much blood I wanted to bleed, more creative locations to cut and more ways to hide them.
I 100% do not advocate any form of self-harm now. There are better, healthier, safer ways. I just didn’t know them at the time or had anyone I trusted enough to help. And it did get addicting, there is a chemical reaction that’s naturally released in your brain when you get cut. It’s like the same endorphins you get from exercise. I knew this later, but I was too lazy. Why run for an hour when you can get the same rush in one cut. And beyond getting addicted, it did leave scars. I have lots of scars. They’re all really tiny so no one really notices them, or at least no one has ever said anything to me about them. But I see them everyday and am reminded of all the pain all over again. And that’s something else I’m still trying to survive from. I don’t have to look further than my arms for a suicide trigger. I’m telling you what I did so you won’t. These are my unfiltered thoughts and why I did what I did, and I regret it. So learn from my mistakes. I crawled through the mud so you don’t have to. If you’re reading this, then you’re blessed enough to live in a time where you have all the help you need at your fingertips.
In the Helpful Resources links on the side are some about self-harming. Something as simple as talking helps so much. I didn’t talk to anyone until it was too late. And if you feel the same addiction I felt, there is hope to overcome it. Like any addiction you need to replace it was something just as powerful, and that’s going to be different for everyone. So you just have to talk it out, try new and different (safe) things. And I was lazy but exercise really is a natural defense against depression. It’s not a cure, but it helps as does a healthy diet. Mind body and soul are all connected.
The second and more time sensitive and extremely controversial thing was seeing someone on screen self-harm. I hadn’t tried that yet.
I’ve attempted suicide too many times to remember, but other than the baseball bat to the head to get dumber, I hadn’t inflected pain on myself on purpose. The baseball bat thing wasn’t for the pain, it was my “science” experiment to change what I didn’t like about myself. So I did that while other kids had a makeover. Anyways, I’ve heard about cutting, but I was too afraid to try it. I didn’t know what I was doing or how that would work. I knew I could kill myself by slitting my wrist or my neck or stabbing into my thighs or gut. But I didn’t know how much pressure or force I would need or how sharp the knife had to be, and I wasn’t strong, and from all my failed attempts I knew the body and mind would instantly fight back or hold back. So if I tried and failed with a knife, I would defiantly bleed but I might not die, and if someone found me, then my secret would be out. And I didn’t want to burden anyone else with my pain. But I never thought of cutting myself just to cut myself. Now on this flip side I still didn’t know the physics and I might accidentally cut too deep and either die when maybe I didn’t want to quite yet or bleed too much and make a mess I couldn’t cover up, and again no more secret. But on the show I saw a girl who I related to because she was “emo” and I was following her storyline and I shared her pain. I remember the scene were the pain was just too much, much like how I often felt, but she didn’t use a knife. She used what was on the desk. A compass (math not maps) and scissors. I knew those were sharp but I didn’t know they were sharp enough to “do the job.” So the next time I was in emotional despair I did what she did. Cut how she cut. At first I wasn’t applying enough pressure so I just felt the cold steel against my skin and that felt good too. But I adjusted and tried again and it felt amazing. Like all my pain was bleeding out of this one little cut on my arm that was barely bleeding. It was cathartic. The release that I needed that wasn’t permanent. And I covered it up like she did. Long sleeves became my best friends. It took about a week for it to heal. So I would cut once a week so I wouldn’t have too many scars to hide. And most didn’t actually leave scars. I still wasn’t cutting nearly deep enough. It was almost like bigger sized paper cuts. I’ll save the stories and more details for another post. But yeah, I learned how to cut by watching tv, and it saved my life. It by no means was the healthiest way to deal with my problems, but it was the only way that I could. And every time I cut was a time I released some pressure so that suicide wasn’t my first option as it had been for a few years at this point. And maybe I could have gotten by without cutting, but maybe I would have finally been successful at a suicide attempt. I was getting older and smarter and more creative. I channeled all that into finding the best angle to cut at, how much pressure for how much blood I wanted to bleed, more creative locations to cut and more ways to hide them.
I 100% do not advocate any form of self-harm now. There are better, healthier, safer ways. I just didn’t know them at the time or had anyone I trusted enough to help. And it did get addicting, there is a chemical reaction that’s naturally released in your brain when you get cut. It’s like the same endorphins you get from exercise. I knew this later, but I was too lazy. Why run for an hour when you can get the same rush in one cut. And beyond getting addicted, it did leave scars. I have lots of scars. They’re all really tiny so no one really notices them, or at least no one has ever said anything to me about them. But I see them everyday and am reminded of all the pain all over again. And that’s something else I’m still trying to survive from. I don’t have to look further than my arms for a suicide trigger. I’m telling you what I did so you won’t. These are my unfiltered thoughts and why I did what I did, and I regret it. So learn from my mistakes. I crawled through the mud so you don’t have to. If you’re reading this, then you’re blessed enough to live in a time where you have all the help you need at your fingertips.
In the Helpful Resources links on the side are some about self-harming. Something as simple as talking helps so much. I didn’t talk to anyone until it was too late. And if you feel the same addiction I felt, there is hope to overcome it. Like any addiction you need to replace it was something just as powerful, and that’s going to be different for everyone. So you just have to talk it out, try new and different (safe) things. And I was lazy but exercise really is a natural defense against depression. It’s not a cure, but it helps as does a healthy diet. Mind body and soul are all connected.
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