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‘Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt

and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and

makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic

has solutions.’

Thomas Szasz

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I think that I’d love to go mad although it seems rude to admit it because those who

are, in fact, mad, are probably in great pain. Deep down I think that it would be great,

although perhaps a little scary.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way I lost track of what normal was. Cutting

myself became so familiar that it never really sunk in properly that it was a bit...um...beyond

normal. I’d realise sometimes, when I’d done something particularly silly. Sometimes, having

not eaten for three or four days, I would wonder if perhaps there was something wrong with

me and I was actually anorexic, but not often. Otherwise I saw it as acceptable behaviour,

something everyone should do. When people on television would get upset or angry I’d tell

them to cut themselves and offer them a razor, because I knew that would help them. Still, I

soon gave up because so few of them ever took me up on the offer. And I could never see

why all these people, trying to restrict their diets so much or dying of obesity, or just unhappy

in overweight bodies, didn’t just throw up what they ate. It could never be as good as

anorexia but it would be better than nothing. Admittedly it never worked for me, but I’m sure

it would have done if I lived on my own.

I was ecstatic when I read a magazine article which claimed that bulimia is sensible,

that there’s nothing wrong with it. Maybe one day popular magazines will say the same about

self-harm.

At least, that’s what I feel that I should say. But really I was terrified and alone when

people just accept my self-harm as reasonable, when they failed to see the deep hurt inside

that was expressed in self-harm with the absence of anyone else to help me out. Really

devastating to have no-one setting me limits or concerned that I was in danger. But generally I

decided that I was better off now, with self-harm and eating disorders.

Every so often I would look at my body in the mirror and understand that everyone did

not have scars all over their bodies. It made me feel like a bit of a freak that so much of my

body was a bit of a mess. I soon got over that though, and I would look at people’s empty

arms and smooth skin and they would look strange. Still, I often wished that my arms were

the same as I gradually ran out of space on my body. I would then imagine cutting their

clear, soft skin, skin not hardened by layers of scar tissue spoiling the buzz.

I did have rules for myself, limits beyond which I would not go. Until I couldn’t resist it.

The first time that I would break the rules I would be angry with myself, and worried that I

might be going too far, but soon it would become commonplace and my limits would be

moved a little further. I promised myself that I would never cut below my knees because that

was freaky. Same with cutting my genitals or cutting my breasts. Soon I did this and new

behaviour was accepted as normal and I promised myself that I’d never cut my feet or my neck.

Because I’d have to be mad to do that(!). And then of course I cut them too, breaking my own

rules, rebelling against myself! In the same way, I thought that I’d stop throwing up if I ever threw

up blood. But desperate times call for desperate measures, after I did I decided that I’d stop if I

ruptured my oesophagus, an event which would almost certainly be fatal.

Every so often I would get scared that I would one day do something too bad and would kill

myself. Still, I couldn’t afford to stop crossing the road out of fear that I would get run over.

Particularly confusing were the mixed messages that I would get from other people.

Some people would tell me that cutting (or ‘scratching’) myself was ‘no big deal’ while others

called me a ‘fucking psycho’. So I would carry on not thinking about it until I more or less

convinced myself that people were being unreasonable when they told me that my behaviour

was maladaptive. After all, who were they to tell me what I should and shouldn’t do with my

body? Soon I saw self-harm and eating disorders as more than rational responses to the

world we live in.

What clinched it for me was the way in which I was told that, as I was deliberately

hurting myself, an ‘abnormal’ behaviour, something bad must have happened to me in

childhood. I decided that, looking from the opposite angle, as I’d had a perfect childhood, this

behaviour must be totally normal.

But I don’t think that anyone could go as far as to rationally say I was mad. When you

put your hand into extremely hot water or extremely cold water, you can’t tell whether it is hot

or cold, it just stings. I think it was the same with me, I was too sane. I thought too much, I

refused to live in denial like everyone else, pretending that death was never going to come

for me. I lived in my head, trying not to let myself go and risk being thought stupid. It was

this over-sanity that made me appear insane to a lot of people around me.