Kudos to Time magazine

for it's story The Cruelest Cut about the practice of cutting, a behaviour that many people, especially young women, engage in as an attempt to feel emotions or block out emotional pain. It usually involves cuts with a razor or knife on the arms or other parts of the bodies. In short, it's self-mutilation.

Cutting and other forms of self-harm are an important diagnostic criterion for borderline personality disorder, although not everyone who cuts themselves is borderline.

I understand the impetus to cut, although I'm not a cutter. I do have the urge to do it, have imagined doing it and have even gone through the motions without actually cutting, but I can usually find something else to do instead. Sometimes I do something constructive, but my main alternatives are to eat or to pick at my arms to the point that they are scarred. When I finally confessed this to a friend one day, he was horrified. It makes no sense to a rational person, I suppose. But it isn't rational. It's a way of blocking out the world for me. I don't know if the picking is due to the obsessive-compulsive disorder or borderline personality--both of which I've been diagnosed as having--but I do know when I am under stress I do it more. The times I have the urge to cut are when I'm at my most emotionally labile. When I'm not actively doing it, though, I'm embarrassed by my weight and by rough skin on my arms, and it's a viscious cycle as I become more acutely aware of my body and what I've done to it. Then I think of ways to control my eating or otherwise get some control over my life, and I worry sometimes that I'll develop an eating disorder, if my binge eating itself doesn't count as one.

Yeah, I'm a mess. But hey, someone has to write these sorts of things so that others can know their not alone, right? And somehow despite everything I manage to get through each day, hold down 2-3 jobs, and maintain contact with the people who are important in my life. So I guess that says something. We all have daemons. These are some of mine, the result of whacky brain chemistry and a background of abuse.