Day 30: Bleed Just to Know

I have always been a bit of an anxious and over-analytical worrier and the state of my fingertips often can clue me in to how agitated I have been in a given week. Nails bitten short is normal, increased stress brings peeled, torn cuticles, and worse is hunting for a pin or needle or embroidery scissors to really attack the cuticles, peel layers of skin off the sides of my thumb and ending up with several smarting, bleeding, band-aided fingertips.

When the song Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls was playing all the time on the radio in the late nineties, I did not bother to find out the name of the band, nor did I ever know the name of the song. All I noticed, besides that it was a beautiful sad song of longing, was this couplet:
When everything feels like the movies
And you bleed just to know you're alive.

I don't know what the writer meant by those lyrics, but I know what those words meant to me. One of the strangest experiences I had during a couple of years when I was floundering in a black hole of major depression was when there were days or hours when I felt like most of me was watching me and my life from a distance, like my life was the movies and I was just viewing this woman Jessica from a safe sofa. I've learned since then that it is called dissociation, and that it is a way of coping with trauma, or getting through a situation that a person doesn't have the skills to integrate into their understanding or model of reality. What is scary about it is the awareness that "there is a me that is watching myself from a distance. Am I the me or am I the myself?"

When that time of illness hit its most intense time and I was in crisis, I had a few weeks where I started a daily ritual that seemed to bring me a sense of release or relief and proof that "I am me AND myself." One day all my fingers were raw and I needed to attack something else and I found this spot on my scalp where the skin was a little bit bumpy or thick or something so I scratched and scratched and tried to scratch the bumpy part off until it was smooth. Eventually I scratched enough so that it bled. And then the next day there was an even bumpier layer of scab to attack and then after a few days I couldn't wait to have a few minutes alone to attack that spot on my scalp and peel off more layers and use a needle or a razor edge and it was like having a hit of drugs when the layer of scab came off and I felt the sticky wet fluid coming out clear or red and it felt so good to see the blood and feel the sting. I am alive! I am bleeding and it hurts! That is so comforting to say and experience when you are in a dissociative state and feel like you are a walking dead person.

I'm still a habitual nail-biter, and my cuticles get punished on occasion, but I have come a long way in finding other ways to release stress and cope with life. There was one other time in the last dozen years since my depression that I attacked my scalp, so I know that I have to beware of a tendency to turn on myself in my worst experiences of being angry or scared or stuck in a corner. That more recent time I wasn't experiencing dissociation and I told a few people I was struggling with it, so even though I was going for blood, it wasn't to prove to myself that I was alive, just a strange indulgence that seemsd to bring relief for a few minutes.

I don't personally know anyone that is caught in a long term struggle with resorting to cutting or self-mutilation as a way to bring on an emotional release, or prove that life is still happening somewhere in there, at least in the circulatory system. I understand, though, that is a very tempting ritual to peel or scratch or cut till the blood comes and believe that seeing red somehow will help the endorphins work their magic.

How do so many self-destructive acts become our self-medication? How can we get so mixed up that we indulge a lust to see our own blood rather than let it be where it needs to stay, inside of us.