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______).::i is for impulse::.__ _ ___
************************************************************************* ‘The most decisive actions of our life—I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future—are, more often than not, unconsidered.’
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Being a teenager, I always did a lot of stuff without thinking, always on impulse. The consequences of my actions did not matter, I just listened to the little voice in my head and went for it. Still, although I may have carried out a lot of my impulses, there were lots that I ignored. Sometimes I would feel quite powerful urges to break a window at school and slit myself with the glass fragments, or to eat drawing pins, or to cut an artery or vein. I would regret not carrying these out, I would feel angry with myself for being boring, and a failure. But then, more often than not I would regret the ones I followed through! Once I nearly cut myself with an electric carving knife. I had been thinking about it for some time but this time I went downstairs and plugged it in and switched it on. Only I chickened out. It did make a loud noise, which worried me, but I imagine that I was more concerned about being out of control, that I could easily have done too much damage. So I put it back in it’s box and went back to bed, screaming at myself for being so rubbish. Bit of an anticlimax that, planning to severely lacerate my arm and then just turning around and going back to bed. I always wanted to drink chemicals that warned on the bottle that you MUST NOT ingest. To me the warning was an invitation! But I never did that either. I knew it had gone too far when I didn’t want to participate in biology experiments because I knew that I would feel to tempted to hurt myself. When I finally was forced to join in I poured the nitric acid over my hand! (Still, at least I restrained from cutting myself with a rusty dissecting razor!) I couldn’t iron because of the voice in my head saying ‘burn yourself, burn yourself...’. Same with curling tongs, they would inevitably be pressed onto my wrists for a while, burning my flesh. I soon learnt that however bad I felt, I should wait until the next day before taking any drastic action in my mind. That rule saved me from a lot of suicidal actions I think. I had to see beyond the pain and the crisis. I could spend a night longing to slit my wrists but would tell myself not to, to wait until the next day- often until I was at school and my parents wouldn’t have to find me. And by the next day I would be emotionally numb again, so I survived. I guess that I could have been in trouble if those feelings had lasted. A lot of my impulses involved shopping or eating. Having spent a day thinking about how great it would be when I would finally stop eating again, starting today, I would go home and just eat, spending little time thinking about it. Or I would spend loads on something that I knew I didn’t want, but I just wanted it at the time so I just thought I’d have it. It would seem that I was a spoilt child. Some impulses were potentially more dangerous. Like when I would suddenly decide ‘sod the diet’ after I failed to do as well as I hoped to do. Afterwards I would be seething with myself, as I would be back to square one after all the hard work. Or I would finish with my boyfriend one day because I was bored and had nothing better to do. I just couldn’t afford these moments of weakness. I was never interested in risk taking, although my behaviours may suggest that I was. But no, impulses would spring from a momentary loss of self-control, however dangerous they may potentially be. I would cut myself in lessons sometimes. I could try and convince myself that I needed to, that there was good reason. Only rarely could this ‘good reason’ not have waited an hour or so. But I would cut there and then, just because I felt like it. After I had carried out the impulse, and the urge was satisfied, only then would it be the time to face the consequences of my actions. Sometimes I would realise how stupid I was, but gradually nothing could shock me and I would sort it out rationally, or just live with it. A lot of the things I would do to myself were perfectly harmless but I would build them up into being life threatening. It sounds paradoxical to be a hypochondriac self-harmer but that was me. I would become scared of death and would tell someone what I had done. That would always be my downfall, my inability to remain silent. When I swallowed glass and injected red food colouring into a vein in my leg, I was terrified that I would perforate something inside or my heart would stop. When my chest pains got worse I was convinced that I had actually gone to far this time. So I told. Once I had been reassured that my body would be fine, for me it became insignificant, and I could just forget about it. Unfortunately no-one else saw it the same way! It was then I learnt that the aftermath is generally worse than whatever I did to start with. When I was younger I was always scared of ink poisoning, I was sure that one day I would nick my hand with my pen and the ink would get into my bloodstream and there would be nothing that they could do to save me. But that didn’t stop me, years later, from dropping ink into a fresh cut. I liked the way it fell and then spread out, seeping it’s way along the wound. After the food colouring doing nothing to hurt me, I should have known that it would be the same way for the ink, but I’ll never learn. This time though, I knew better than to admit what I’d done. I’ll never be able to predict which things I do that will be accepted casually and which things will be seen as being more serious. So, just in case it would be one of those things that would invite a heap of verbal abuse that I was mad and deserved sectioning, although I doubted that it would be, I mentioned it in passing, as hypothetical. Once my fears were laid to rest everything was okay again, no need to worry. I was always just too safe, could never quite commit myself to anything. I really felt like I wanted to die but could never be brave enough to go for it. I wished that I was dead, that way I would be dead and it would be over, the hard bit of actually dying, the unknown. I saw an episode of the American show ER once where a prisoner swallowed razor blades. They thought he had attempted suicide until they discovered that the blades were taped and he must have just been trying to escape. That would be me, trying to escape from my world where no-one saw my pain rather than in fact trying to die. I always held that dream that one day someone would see the hurt inside of me for what it was, rather than assuming I was feeling sorry for myself and that I could just pull myself together. |
