To kill time and keep me from over doing things while I heal up I've been watching movies. I just finished the seven SAW movies. I had seen all of them except #7. Good movies if your a fan of psychological horror films. For those who haven't seen them, the basic premise is, Jigsaw puts you in a puzzle that will kill you and you have to really choose to want to live to get out.
As I watched the characters having to choose to hurt themselves deliberately in order to survive Jigsaw's traps, it brought up some questions in relation to self injury.
I am going to put another *GRAFFIC TRIGGER * here because the discussion will be.
It was interesting to see the characters making choices (like sawing off ones leg, or cutting off their flesh) they all had to make quick decisions, there was no spending hours working up the nerve, there was a clicking timer that they had to race.
Most of the time it was a quick decision and the actor went into the act of self injury with a scream, as if the loudness would drown out the pain.
and it occurred to me
I have never gone screaming into an injury.
Screaming releases nothing. Basically for me the blood is louder then screams.
To go screaming into the pain does what?, meeting the physical pain with a thunderous roar of ....of what? Courage? Sacrifice? Defiance? Angry raw adrenaline burst?
What do you think self injures do? What do you imagine happens when our darkness and pain brings that knife to our skin?
I can't speak for all of us.
For me it depends on the type of injury and the trigger.
Rage injury
The stress boils over and my head is filled with thick muffled explosions as bombs go off with in me. There is a pressure that seeks to exit via a scream........but........my throat is gone. My mouth is sealed. LOCKED. Like some ancient bronze plate has been fastened with bolts to my face. Finding no exit the screams reverberate back into the thick pressure in my head.
I raise my fist and punch the (insert any number of hard objects). Blow after blow in quick succession...until at last I feel my skin scream out in pain and the internal torment is at last released from its silence.
(anger is an energy)
I halt.
With each heave of my chest and exhausted exhale, I feel the stress run out of me.
my head clears.
ugh.
Slowly I look at my hand to assess the damage.
ugh...zero days without self injuring. damn it,
I start the process of looking backwards. What clues did I miss that lead to this? Where did I zig when I should have zagged? What red flag did I ignore? What could I have done to prevent this from happening in the first place?
I flex my fingers. Blood is still seeping into the tissues swelling then even before the bruises show up.
'why?' my heart cries.
Each tear dripping from my eyes silently answers, 'I don't know.'
Punishment
The event is so awful my head can't comprehend it. The pain, to devastating for me to live with and continue breathing. I have to push it away to survive. But I don't want to EVER forget.
I choose a spot for the burn. I choose a spot where I will have to see it every day. everyday forever.
Lighter? candle? matches? I weigh the options. Each one brings a different level of pain to the table.
(Lighter): flame time limited by cramping thumb. Burns often interrupted by need to adjust and relight the lighter. The secondary burn caused my the flame being bent backwards often times is annoying, and has in the past interrupted my concentration.
(Candle): Continuous flame, one long smooth burn, only one focus, burns often larger then intended.
(Matches): a whole new game. It's not one injury. They are a lot of little injuries. Each one requiring
....and here is where I had to stop writing/thinking as I triggered my self.
I may come back and finish this when I am on stable ground. Right now the tight rope is swaying a bit because my life is in a state of flux post surgery.
I won't egg me on. I know even though I am well wrapped and as "healed" as I am, I can never forget, I live with self injury. If I forget that, I will slide right back into it. I worked to freaking hard to wrestle it into a small space in my head to allow it free reign again.
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