self-injury.net

"Sometimes you just feel like shit. Telling yourself you feel terrific and wearing a brave smile and refusing to give in to “negative thinking” is not only inaccurate - dishonest - but it can make you feel worse."

"I remembered from my own worst times those eager, questioning faces, or my father saying, “Are you doing any better?” and how disappointing I felt when I said, “No, not really."

"This body is yours. No one can ever take it from you, if only you will accept yourself, claim it again—your arms, your spine, your ribs, the small of your back. It’s all yours. All this bounty, all this beauty, all this strength and grace is yours. This garden is yours. Take it back. Take it back."

"Arrhythmia was the title of the book. Arrhythmia
and Other Stories. A glossy black dust jacket
with a complicated holographic heart as vivid
as a picture of anatomy in the World Book of Knowledge,

compounded by overlays of plastic where staticky
transparency could be peeled from staticky transparency
until you reached the heart’s core — a huge necktie knot
of muscle. The book stacked with others on a cart

of dollar bargains outside a shop where I stopped
to kill time. A name is so much harder to remember
than a face, a face is so much language compressed.
The author’s name stamped in gold beneath the textured,

naked heart meant nothing until the jacket photograph,
a head shot, sprung out from the inside flap unfolding
in my hand, as if I’d caught an energy the book
could not contain — a face and name now clearly printed

in bold type with facts about her life: her name a plant,
a vine with tiny feet that grows on anything, spade-
shaped leaves, green and black-veined, but not
the name I knew her by twenty years ago, the one

she’d give to herself, not a name really but an assault
on her name, an activity spelled out in scars
across her stomach and down her thighs, not imperfections
of skin as first I’d thought, not anything at my age then

I could imagine or easily comprehend or not doubt
except when she said how only recently she’d stopped
cutting herself. “I’m a bleeder,” she said. And that’s
the name I’ve thought of through the years when

I’ve thought of her. The razor made her feel
both better and worse about herself. “Worse,” she said,
because you could not respect the inch of suicide each slash
defined and “better” because at least you’d done something

to confirm your utter worthlessness. Now, it seems ridiculous.
But her book, which I found by accident, is evidence
she survived, what we survived! A young woman in one
           of her stories
asks a character named White Boy, “Tell me, am I beautiful?”

And he responds, “No, not beautiful, but exotic,” which was
           another way
I had for saying lovely, baffling, and all-consuming,
everything White Boy could never be except in proximity
to the danged she embodied: the bleeder, self-named, and
           that other name—

the vine whose leaves were shaped like hearts, not spades."

"Depression is humiliating. It turns intelligent, kind people into zombies who can’t wash a dish or change their socks. It affects the ability to think clearly, to feel anything, to ascribe value to your children, your lifelong passions, your relative good fortune. It scoops out your normal healthy ability to cope with bad days and bad news, and replaces it with an unrecognizable sludge that finds no pleasure, no delight, no point in anything outside of bed. You alienate your friends because you can’t comport yourself socially, you risk your job because you can’t concentrate, you live in moderate squalor because you have no energy to stand up, let alone take out the garbage. You become pathetic and you know it. And you have no capacity to stop the downward plunge. You have no perspective, no emotional reserves, no faith that it will get better. So you feel guilty and ashamed of your inability to deal with life like a regular human, which exacerbates the depression and the isolation. If you’ve never been depressed, thank your lucky stars and back off the folks who take a pill so they can make eye contact with the grocery store cashier. No one on earth would choose the nightmare of depression over an averagely turbulent normal life.

It’s not an incapacity to cope with day to day living in the modern world. It’s an incapacity to function. At all. If you and your loved ones have been spared, every blessing to you. If depression has taken root in you or your loved ones, every blessing to you, too. No one chooses it. No one deserves it. It runs in families, it ruins families. You cannot imagine what it takes to feign normalcy, to show up to work, to make a dentist appointment, to pay bills, to walk your dog, to return library books on time, to keep enough toilet paper on hand, when you are exerting most of your capacity on trying not to kill yourself. Depression is real. Just because you’ve never had it doesn’t make it imaginary. Compassion is also real. And a depressed person may cling desperately to it until they are out of the woods and they may remember your compassion for the rest of their lives as a force greater than their depression. Have a heart. Judge not lest ye be judged."

"I actually attack the concept of happiness. I don’t mind people being happy - but the idea that everything we do is part of the pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness. It’s a really odd thing that we’re now seeing people saying “write down 3 things that made you happy today before you go to sleep”, and “cheer up” and “happiness is our birthright” and so on. We’re kind of teaching our kids that happiness is the default position - it’s rubbish. Wholeness is what we ought to be striving for and part of that is sadness, disappointment, frustration, failure; all of those things which make us who we are. Happiness and victory and fulfillment are nice little things that also happen to us, but they don’t teach us much. Everyone says we grow through pain and then as soon as they experience pain they say “Quick! Move on! Cheer up!” I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness”. Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is."

"Our lives improve only when we take chances and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves."