~Cutting~
If you have been following my blog so far it is no surprise to you that I talk about heavy-duty stuff...I promise you, that is not going to be all that my blog has to offer but like therapy is for some,. getting the big topics out on the table can enable me to break them down, dissect and,hopefully, fix them.
As a very thinned-skinned girl growing up, everything people said to me, even well intentioned people, was taken in and almost always turned around in my own head to become a negative thing. "I like your skirt" meant the person must hate my top or "You did a great job on this assignment must mean I did terribly on every other one.It was consuming me and man was it exhausting. I imagine for my close friends and family it must have been like egg shells all around me and no one really knew if they should come near. Looking back I see where my illness pushed people away. Sad.
I grew up in a tiny rural town. The kind of town where cable didn't come along until I was a teenager and even now its ancient. The kind of town where there were no signal lights until someone got the idea to put a mall in. Now we are a tiny town with a great big mall. Anyway, in this small town where I live again, our school was small too. Lanesborough only has an elementary school. For middle and high school kids go to Williamstown (known for Williams College Ivy league school). The high school,Mount Greylock, houses kids from 7Th grade to 12Th. Once you graduate from elementary we were put on a bus (first one I ever rode except for Field trips) and driven over a half hour to school in yet another rural town. There kids form at least 4 small towns continue on their education. The hard part, as you can imagine, is that all the kids you are used to and grew up with are suddenly put together with more kids you have most likely never met. If you are well-liked it usually continues and if you aren't, well, that gets worse. I don't know why, maybe because of my brother breaking into almost the entire town's houses or maybe because I have always been shy and lacked self-esteem, I was not popular but not ignored either.Let's just say I was friends with people from every group and that was just fine with me.
In Elementary school the shyness I felt in the beginning melted away and by the 5Th and 6Th grade I was a ham. I wanted attention and there were many ways to get it at Lanesboro. We had skits to do in English class, my teachers were promoting my poetry (not that there was much yet) and every Friday at lunchtime there was an open talent show. There I found my love of being on stage. I would get up on the stage in front of all the lanesboro students and sing and dance along to anything from Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" to Micheal Jackson's "Thriller". I don't remember much about it really except that my fellow classmates must have liked it or pretended to because I kept going back every week and do another new skit.
Up to Mt Greylock. That school seemed huge and like a maze to me at first. There were many kids, lots of classrooms and very little chance to find self-esteem. I got through 7Th grade pretty much unscathed and unnoticed. 8Th grade things changed. Suddenly my priority was finding a role model and putting a great need for attention on that one person. I didn't understand it except that I was living my life with virtually no adults around as my Mom worked until 10 or 11 pm and my father worked 12hour nights and when he was home he was in his bedroom sleeping.
For that reason along with trying to find my place in the school and in the world, I suppose, I found myself seeking the validation of my female English teacher. We will call her Mrs. G. So, Mrs. G. seemed to like the idea that I looked to her for her constant stamp on everything I did until it got annoying to her. On one of those days she sent me to an audition after school for a Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet. The two women who were directing the play were actresses straight from "Shakespeare and Company". They auditioned all of us, students from 7Th -12Th grade. Yet instead of reading for parts they did exercises where we would stand on the stage and scream or run around and do unscripted skits. One thing we did, omg, I will never forget. The directors asked us each to run up onto the stage and do something we had never done before in front of anyone. I didn't know what to do but as I ran up to the stage I had it in my head that I would let out my wildest operatic voice I could muster. It was for comic relief as my voice was not meant to sing arias.Still, as I got up to the stage and I opened my mouth to sing (badly) I instead heard myself saying the words, "When I was 7 years old I was molested." and with it came tears.
I was as shocked as my fellow classmates and the directors. I went off of the stage eyes full of tears and my face burning hot wondering where the hell the words came from. I was met by other auditioners, some crying, lots of them hugging me, telling me how brave I was. One of the directors came out to see me after everyone had finished to hug me and said that she was proud of me. She asked me if I had told anyone else that secret. I told her that yes, I had told my Mom, finally, a few years before, but no, I didn't make a habit of blurting it out. She hugged me for what seemed forever. I felt that she truly knew what I had gone through and knew too well what being molested felt like.
A day or so later I was going to the door of the auditorium to check to see if my name was on the list, if I had earned myself a part in the play. Before I could look a 12Th grader said to me, "Congratulations, Stacy, you are the nurse!" The nurse, wow, a part..I thought it must be small if I didn't have a name but small was great since I didn't expect anything. Soon I found out that the nurse part was anything but small. She is Juliet's nurse, her right-hand, the woman who helps Juliet to be with Romeo. I couldn't believe that I hadn't gotten such a great role.
Being in the play kept me busy for months. Long hours after school and weekends to help with the stage backdrops. I was feeling like part of a family. It was great. The nights we did the play were magical and I loved every minute. I even got one of the biggest laughs when I got to climb onto stage to meet Juliet by literally climbing onto the 4-foot wall of the stage then rolling over on the floor at Juliet's feet. The audience was laughing and clapping as here I was this old nurse who weighed at least 300 pounds (I wore a "fat-suit") and I was climbing a wall...And to top things off, my cousin who was 3 years old at the time and sitting in the front row of the audience yelled out "STACY!" just as I got up on the stage after acting as if I were struggling! I had the best time of my life on that stage. I went onto do 3 plays a year from 9Th grade to 12Th and loved every part I played whether it was a big part like the nurse or a small part like a "chorus girl".
In 10Th grade I met another English teacher who helped me so very much in my writing of poetry and also in my emotional melt down. See, in 9Th grade before the plays and around them I felt lonely, misunderstood and sad. Mrs. G. was not ready to handle what I was going through so therefore she sent me to the audition. It ended up being a positive step but all else she did was not. I won't get into all that here but I will say that I do forgive her. I have since learned that her life, too, was a mess and she was in no place in her life to help me, a student longing for attention and becoming a cutter.
I didn't want to die, I was NOT suicidal. Many people assume that if a person takes a knife to their skin to cut that they must want to die and that is not the case in people who cut usually. It wasn't for me anyway. I don't really know how to explain what my motives were in cutting. I just knew that inside of me my emotions were overflowing. I was feeling unloved, unnoticed and as sad as ever. My mother was hardly home as I said, my father was either working or in his bedroom sulking, my brother was making his way through our relatives, neighbors and friends as well as stores and other business robbing and at this point, my classmates were comparing me to him. This was around the time that he stole the duffel bag of candy bars to sell at school. He was begging his classmates for money for lunch, skipping classes, getting suspended all the time and when we were home alone, he was either berating me or holding me down on the floor hitting me and my sister. I hated him. I hated me for hating him. I hated My parents for never being around to control him and for not knowing how the few times that they were.
He went onto bigger robberies and was caught trying to mug an 80 year old woman at a public place and was put into the county jail. Wow, all at once I was sad for my Mom who was heartbroken yet relieved to be left alone at home as well as not have him messing up at school for all of my friends to see and judge.
Yet with this freedom I also found myself, finally in my own room, wanting to let out the pain inside that for so long had cause me such agony. I don't know why,but one day while putting away the dishes I grabbed a knife the wrong way and it sliced my finger. As the blood ran down my hand I remember feeling some release of pain within.
That was all it took. I hoarded that knife in my room and would cut the backs of my hands and my arms. With each slice another release of pressure, another streaming of pain would flood out my body. I did this a couple times a week. I would not bring a knife to school but instead would find other things to deal with my pain...Paperclips, erasers, etc. I would hide the cuts by pulling my sleeves down over my hands, often times putting holes into the garment so my thumb could go through and it would permanently hide the cuts.
Funny that I went to so much trouble to hide my secret when part of the sickness is needing attention. I wanted my secret to be found out in one way but under my control. When my Mother soon learned about it from my teachers the pain in her eyes and the words that she spoke to me were not what I wanted. Hurting her made me want to cut more. I didn't want my parents or my family to know, just people outside my family zone, certain teachers, role models...I didn't even want any of my friends to know because I knew they would think of me as a freak. I wanted to put out there to my English teacher, Mrs. G. especially,that I was hurting and therefore cutting. Still, when she turned me in I was back to square one. Having my parents involved was not part of my plan.
I cut myself a lot that first year in 9Th grade and in 10TH I slowed down but it wasn't completely gone. I went onto cut on and off, (once a month or so)into 11Th grade. That was the year that everything blew up. To spite being busy with plays, musicals and chorus recitals, I always found time to imprint the pain in my flesh. I was seeing a psychologist thanks to the help from my 10Th grade English teacher and I wasn't venting alot of my emotions into poetry but the pain was getting greater and the cutting, ehich was always shallow,thank God, was not doing the jon anymore. I was feeling even more lonely and sad and no matter what I did, who I talked to or as many times as I would cut, I couldn't get relief from the pain of the memories of being molested and losing people close to me, (friends who had moved on and my Grand father who had died).I think a lot of my pain regarding being molested was compouded by the fact that I was getting to the age where I would become attracted to boys and the question of whether I could or should trust boys was there.Although I knew being abused was not my fault I felt ashamed and scared of any interaction that might be on the horizon. Everything building up in me and all at once I felt like I broke. One night I went through the entire house finding and collecting every drug, knife and bottle of alcohol. I didn't know what I was going to do, I knew I was just so sick of feeling.
After I found everything I laid it out on my bed and looking at it I began to feel so alone and started crying. i knew suddenly that all of the things I had collected, the drugs and alcohol, were all, if taken together, a recipe for death. At that moment I stopped and called down to my Mother who had come home from work. When she came upstairs she found me in the middle of all of these items crying. I had cut myself and she could see the blood staining my sleeves. Until that moment she only knew I had done it once a year before and thought it was getting taken care of with my weekly trip to the psychologist. Not wanting to hurt her or have her ashamed of me, I hid the fact that I was still cutting.
That night I begged for help and I went to a hospital out of state. There I stayed for almost a month. What I found there scared the hell out of me. I lost my freedoms, my own rights over my body and met a dozen other kids like me, some of whom who had been there almost their whole life. That place scared me straight and I have never cut again! No, its not that I haven't thought about it because I have. Yet when I DO think about it I think about being locked in a hospital, eating food with a spoon, having someone pop in every hour to check my name off on their clipboard that I am safe, having to show my body and let them count my cuts and scars to be sure there are no new ones and not being able to have perfume or shampoo because they thought I might drink it to end my life. I once cut to let out my pain and now I know that the only bleeding that I can do that will help me and not kill me is the bleeding my bed does when I write.
If you have any kids about to become teenagers, especially girls,keep an eye on them. Give them all the love and attention you can, no matter how many other kids with problems you may have and let them know that if they are sad and they can't talk to you, offer them the chance to talk to someone,anyone...Look for the signs of depression like not eating, overeating, sleeping A LOT or hardly at all, hiding their arms or some other part of their body(some people cut on their legs, stomach or even their backs) and always let them know that they are not alone. Don't be afraid, when age appropriate, to share your own experiences of sadness and depression and, with the help of a therapist maybe, your own cutting. Do it with love and you will never go wrong. Don't say "no, not my kid, never!" I was the perfect kid as far as my parents knew and all along I was cutting and hurting. Please, don't let your kids suffer alone. Help them find their own outlets to get out their pain like writing,kick boxing, drawing~~~ANYTHING that gets their pain under control. Even though cutting is not usually about wanting to die some people DO DIE doing it. I will write about this subject again sometime, try to get down to the source of it for my own sake as well as for yours if you have someone who is suffering with it. It is hard to explain when you are in the clutches of it. Thankfully it is a memory now and although I haven't cut in many years, I still have to find outlets because like any disease, its not always completely curable. This is newer disease to the psychiatric world. Thanks for reading :)
~Stacy J Roosa
As a very thinned-skinned girl growing up, everything people said to me, even well intentioned people, was taken in and almost always turned around in my own head to become a negative thing. "I like your skirt" meant the person must hate my top or "You did a great job on this assignment must mean I did terribly on every other one.It was consuming me and man was it exhausting. I imagine for my close friends and family it must have been like egg shells all around me and no one really knew if they should come near. Looking back I see where my illness pushed people away. Sad.
I grew up in a tiny rural town. The kind of town where cable didn't come along until I was a teenager and even now its ancient. The kind of town where there were no signal lights until someone got the idea to put a mall in. Now we are a tiny town with a great big mall. Anyway, in this small town where I live again, our school was small too. Lanesborough only has an elementary school. For middle and high school kids go to Williamstown (known for Williams College Ivy league school). The high school,Mount Greylock, houses kids from 7Th grade to 12Th. Once you graduate from elementary we were put on a bus (first one I ever rode except for Field trips) and driven over a half hour to school in yet another rural town. There kids form at least 4 small towns continue on their education. The hard part, as you can imagine, is that all the kids you are used to and grew up with are suddenly put together with more kids you have most likely never met. If you are well-liked it usually continues and if you aren't, well, that gets worse. I don't know why, maybe because of my brother breaking into almost the entire town's houses or maybe because I have always been shy and lacked self-esteem, I was not popular but not ignored either.Let's just say I was friends with people from every group and that was just fine with me.
In Elementary school the shyness I felt in the beginning melted away and by the 5Th and 6Th grade I was a ham. I wanted attention and there were many ways to get it at Lanesboro. We had skits to do in English class, my teachers were promoting my poetry (not that there was much yet) and every Friday at lunchtime there was an open talent show. There I found my love of being on stage. I would get up on the stage in front of all the lanesboro students and sing and dance along to anything from Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" to Micheal Jackson's "Thriller". I don't remember much about it really except that my fellow classmates must have liked it or pretended to because I kept going back every week and do another new skit.
Up to Mt Greylock. That school seemed huge and like a maze to me at first. There were many kids, lots of classrooms and very little chance to find self-esteem. I got through 7Th grade pretty much unscathed and unnoticed. 8Th grade things changed. Suddenly my priority was finding a role model and putting a great need for attention on that one person. I didn't understand it except that I was living my life with virtually no adults around as my Mom worked until 10 or 11 pm and my father worked 12hour nights and when he was home he was in his bedroom sleeping.
For that reason along with trying to find my place in the school and in the world, I suppose, I found myself seeking the validation of my female English teacher. We will call her Mrs. G. So, Mrs. G. seemed to like the idea that I looked to her for her constant stamp on everything I did until it got annoying to her. On one of those days she sent me to an audition after school for a Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet. The two women who were directing the play were actresses straight from "Shakespeare and Company". They auditioned all of us, students from 7Th -12Th grade. Yet instead of reading for parts they did exercises where we would stand on the stage and scream or run around and do unscripted skits. One thing we did, omg, I will never forget. The directors asked us each to run up onto the stage and do something we had never done before in front of anyone. I didn't know what to do but as I ran up to the stage I had it in my head that I would let out my wildest operatic voice I could muster. It was for comic relief as my voice was not meant to sing arias.Still, as I got up to the stage and I opened my mouth to sing (badly) I instead heard myself saying the words, "When I was 7 years old I was molested." and with it came tears.
I was as shocked as my fellow classmates and the directors. I went off of the stage eyes full of tears and my face burning hot wondering where the hell the words came from. I was met by other auditioners, some crying, lots of them hugging me, telling me how brave I was. One of the directors came out to see me after everyone had finished to hug me and said that she was proud of me. She asked me if I had told anyone else that secret. I told her that yes, I had told my Mom, finally, a few years before, but no, I didn't make a habit of blurting it out. She hugged me for what seemed forever. I felt that she truly knew what I had gone through and knew too well what being molested felt like.
A day or so later I was going to the door of the auditorium to check to see if my name was on the list, if I had earned myself a part in the play. Before I could look a 12Th grader said to me, "Congratulations, Stacy, you are the nurse!" The nurse, wow, a part..I thought it must be small if I didn't have a name but small was great since I didn't expect anything. Soon I found out that the nurse part was anything but small. She is Juliet's nurse, her right-hand, the woman who helps Juliet to be with Romeo. I couldn't believe that I hadn't gotten such a great role.
Being in the play kept me busy for months. Long hours after school and weekends to help with the stage backdrops. I was feeling like part of a family. It was great. The nights we did the play were magical and I loved every minute. I even got one of the biggest laughs when I got to climb onto stage to meet Juliet by literally climbing onto the 4-foot wall of the stage then rolling over on the floor at Juliet's feet. The audience was laughing and clapping as here I was this old nurse who weighed at least 300 pounds (I wore a "fat-suit") and I was climbing a wall...And to top things off, my cousin who was 3 years old at the time and sitting in the front row of the audience yelled out "STACY!" just as I got up on the stage after acting as if I were struggling! I had the best time of my life on that stage. I went onto do 3 plays a year from 9Th grade to 12Th and loved every part I played whether it was a big part like the nurse or a small part like a "chorus girl".
In 10Th grade I met another English teacher who helped me so very much in my writing of poetry and also in my emotional melt down. See, in 9Th grade before the plays and around them I felt lonely, misunderstood and sad. Mrs. G. was not ready to handle what I was going through so therefore she sent me to the audition. It ended up being a positive step but all else she did was not. I won't get into all that here but I will say that I do forgive her. I have since learned that her life, too, was a mess and she was in no place in her life to help me, a student longing for attention and becoming a cutter.
I didn't want to die, I was NOT suicidal. Many people assume that if a person takes a knife to their skin to cut that they must want to die and that is not the case in people who cut usually. It wasn't for me anyway. I don't really know how to explain what my motives were in cutting. I just knew that inside of me my emotions were overflowing. I was feeling unloved, unnoticed and as sad as ever. My mother was hardly home as I said, my father was either working or in his bedroom sulking, my brother was making his way through our relatives, neighbors and friends as well as stores and other business robbing and at this point, my classmates were comparing me to him. This was around the time that he stole the duffel bag of candy bars to sell at school. He was begging his classmates for money for lunch, skipping classes, getting suspended all the time and when we were home alone, he was either berating me or holding me down on the floor hitting me and my sister. I hated him. I hated me for hating him. I hated My parents for never being around to control him and for not knowing how the few times that they were.
He went onto bigger robberies and was caught trying to mug an 80 year old woman at a public place and was put into the county jail. Wow, all at once I was sad for my Mom who was heartbroken yet relieved to be left alone at home as well as not have him messing up at school for all of my friends to see and judge.
Yet with this freedom I also found myself, finally in my own room, wanting to let out the pain inside that for so long had cause me such agony. I don't know why,but one day while putting away the dishes I grabbed a knife the wrong way and it sliced my finger. As the blood ran down my hand I remember feeling some release of pain within.
That was all it took. I hoarded that knife in my room and would cut the backs of my hands and my arms. With each slice another release of pressure, another streaming of pain would flood out my body. I did this a couple times a week. I would not bring a knife to school but instead would find other things to deal with my pain...Paperclips, erasers, etc. I would hide the cuts by pulling my sleeves down over my hands, often times putting holes into the garment so my thumb could go through and it would permanently hide the cuts.
Funny that I went to so much trouble to hide my secret when part of the sickness is needing attention. I wanted my secret to be found out in one way but under my control. When my Mother soon learned about it from my teachers the pain in her eyes and the words that she spoke to me were not what I wanted. Hurting her made me want to cut more. I didn't want my parents or my family to know, just people outside my family zone, certain teachers, role models...I didn't even want any of my friends to know because I knew they would think of me as a freak. I wanted to put out there to my English teacher, Mrs. G. especially,that I was hurting and therefore cutting. Still, when she turned me in I was back to square one. Having my parents involved was not part of my plan.
I cut myself a lot that first year in 9Th grade and in 10TH I slowed down but it wasn't completely gone. I went onto cut on and off, (once a month or so)into 11Th grade. That was the year that everything blew up. To spite being busy with plays, musicals and chorus recitals, I always found time to imprint the pain in my flesh. I was seeing a psychologist thanks to the help from my 10Th grade English teacher and I wasn't venting alot of my emotions into poetry but the pain was getting greater and the cutting, ehich was always shallow,thank God, was not doing the jon anymore. I was feeling even more lonely and sad and no matter what I did, who I talked to or as many times as I would cut, I couldn't get relief from the pain of the memories of being molested and losing people close to me, (friends who had moved on and my Grand father who had died).I think a lot of my pain regarding being molested was compouded by the fact that I was getting to the age where I would become attracted to boys and the question of whether I could or should trust boys was there.Although I knew being abused was not my fault I felt ashamed and scared of any interaction that might be on the horizon. Everything building up in me and all at once I felt like I broke. One night I went through the entire house finding and collecting every drug, knife and bottle of alcohol. I didn't know what I was going to do, I knew I was just so sick of feeling.
After I found everything I laid it out on my bed and looking at it I began to feel so alone and started crying. i knew suddenly that all of the things I had collected, the drugs and alcohol, were all, if taken together, a recipe for death. At that moment I stopped and called down to my Mother who had come home from work. When she came upstairs she found me in the middle of all of these items crying. I had cut myself and she could see the blood staining my sleeves. Until that moment she only knew I had done it once a year before and thought it was getting taken care of with my weekly trip to the psychologist. Not wanting to hurt her or have her ashamed of me, I hid the fact that I was still cutting.
That night I begged for help and I went to a hospital out of state. There I stayed for almost a month. What I found there scared the hell out of me. I lost my freedoms, my own rights over my body and met a dozen other kids like me, some of whom who had been there almost their whole life. That place scared me straight and I have never cut again! No, its not that I haven't thought about it because I have. Yet when I DO think about it I think about being locked in a hospital, eating food with a spoon, having someone pop in every hour to check my name off on their clipboard that I am safe, having to show my body and let them count my cuts and scars to be sure there are no new ones and not being able to have perfume or shampoo because they thought I might drink it to end my life. I once cut to let out my pain and now I know that the only bleeding that I can do that will help me and not kill me is the bleeding my bed does when I write.
If you have any kids about to become teenagers, especially girls,keep an eye on them. Give them all the love and attention you can, no matter how many other kids with problems you may have and let them know that if they are sad and they can't talk to you, offer them the chance to talk to someone,anyone...Look for the signs of depression like not eating, overeating, sleeping A LOT or hardly at all, hiding their arms or some other part of their body(some people cut on their legs, stomach or even their backs) and always let them know that they are not alone. Don't be afraid, when age appropriate, to share your own experiences of sadness and depression and, with the help of a therapist maybe, your own cutting. Do it with love and you will never go wrong. Don't say "no, not my kid, never!" I was the perfect kid as far as my parents knew and all along I was cutting and hurting. Please, don't let your kids suffer alone. Help them find their own outlets to get out their pain like writing,kick boxing, drawing~~~ANYTHING that gets their pain under control. Even though cutting is not usually about wanting to die some people DO DIE doing it. I will write about this subject again sometime, try to get down to the source of it for my own sake as well as for yours if you have someone who is suffering with it. It is hard to explain when you are in the clutches of it. Thankfully it is a memory now and although I haven't cut in many years, I still have to find outlets because like any disease, its not always completely curable. This is newer disease to the psychiatric world. Thanks for reading :)
~Stacy J Roosa
Comments
Post a Comment
Have something to add?