User Profile

"...I walked around the block, feeling Olivia's arms around me, my nose full of perfume and the smell of her skin, my head swirling with what I had seen and heard in the house so much like ours, and yet not at all. And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door."
-White Oleander

“Why? That's the question you always come back to, the tough one. Why cut? Why, of all things, take a razor blade to my skin?
This is a story about how an ordinary person can end up traveling some dark and unexpected roads. So I can tell you that any one of us might sometimes be driven by blind, inchoate need. I can tell you that the idea and the urge to cut seemed to arise from my very skin itself. That doesn’t really answer the question, though.
I can tell you that a well-timed wound focuses the mind marvelously—don’t you remember the sudden clarity that followed a skinned knee, a split lip, when all the world came down to body and blood, nerve endings and adrenaline?
I can tell you that on a global human scale, ritualized self-mutilation is surprisingly common. What in Western culture is pathologized as an indicator of profound dysfunction is in other cultures the very vehicle, the visible sign of a society’s claim upon that body—in scarification, in tattoos, and in measures more drastic than anything I ever considered.
None of this, of course, answers the question.
I can tell you that our bodies sometimes serve as the symbolic ground where order and disorder fight for supremacy, an uneasy divide that to some of us feels as porous and inconstant as a frayed tatter of gauze. The minions of chaos threaten to cross over at every turn, lurking in the cheating spouse, the undiscovered tumor, the murderous dictator, the brewing tornado, the salmonella in the Christmas turkey, the leak in the brake line. At any given moment, life is falling apart as fast as we’re shoring it up.
‘Self mutilation may sometimes be a creative act linked with the restructuring of chaos into…order,’ writes Armando Favazza in his study of self-mutilation, Bodies Under Siege.
Not that any of these points necessarily brings us closer to an answer.
I can tell you that I am far from alone, that there are cutters and biters, pickers and pokers, bangers and breakers and burners and pullers and prickers. Some of us are specialists in our chosen method, and some of us care only to get the job done and will take whatever’s handy. Have you ever wanted to punch the wall, pull your hair out? Don’t think you might not be one of us.
I can tell you that the ‘typical’ self-mutilator, the textbook case, is someone just like me: young, female, probably with an eating disorder thrown in (but that’s another chapter), who started cutting sometime early in adolescence.
I can enumerate the various theories of self-mutilation, the sociocultural and the psychosexual, the biogenetic and the family-dynamic, all of them argued ardently by their various proponents armed with statistical charts and case studies.
Would any of these details really explain why?
I can offer you, as I have, my little penny-ante repertoire of teenage troubles. Collectively or individually, however, do they constitute sufficient grounds for taking up self-mutilation? Even as I set forth these explanations, I want to withdraw them again. I think what I thought when I was twelve, and thirteen, and fifteen, and twenty: None of these is reason enough, none of these is legitimate cause.
Well, how many troubles should equal a legitimate reason for self-mutilation? Ten? Twenty? One hundred? And how monumental must these troubles be? There’s probably no critical mass beyond which cutting yourself would ever seem, to most people, like a reasonable choice. I cut because it did look that way to me. I cut because something had to give. I cut because the alternatives were worse.
We’re always looking for the logical explanation, the smoking gun, the inscrutably sagacious detective who will reveal all in the final chapter—but some things are too complex to suffer reduction to a simple equation of why/because. I know that cutting was my defense against an internal chaos, against a sense of the world gone out of control. Hat I can’t tell you is where that chaos came from, what exact balance of factors blew up the maelstrom of my mind. Maybe what drove me to cut doesn’t have any cause I can name. Maybe it oozed up from nowhere, from within my blood, my cells, my very DNA.
Our family tree is hung with cranks and eccentrics, the merely batty, the existentially despondent, and so on down the precipitous decline to the drinkers and depressives and suicides. My father, in trying to explain to me once how I was related to a distant cousin, took me along a genealogical pathway strewn with bodies, including one entire family done in by razor and rope and revolver. So maybe I got my father’s eyes, my mother’s nose, and in the bargain an altogether murkier inheritance.
I suffered homesickness so extreme when I was a child that it bordered on panic, with frantic midnight calls begging my parents to come rescue me from wherever I had been invited to spend the night. I was paralyzingly afraid of the dark, and sometimes visited by nightmares so vivid and strangely disturbing that I can remember them still in almost perfect detail. I was so easily and thoroughly absorbed into the imagined world of my books or my toys that the lived world sometimes felt less real to me. It was an absolute policy of mine that I would not read any book in which the animal died in the end. In retrospect, should we have understood these things as indicators of a mind playing in the wrong key? Or is it only in retrospect that they start to look odd?
On a trip to West Virginia once, I stopped at the place billed as the official headwater of the Potomac—a paltry spurt of water burbling up into a trickle of a stream choked by winter leaves. In the end, if we could ever really pursue the question why to its true headwaters, we might find it is often no more than this: a beginning so trifling that it hardly bears notice. The flip of a switch. The flash of a neurotransmission. Maybe there was always something amiss, like a bulb planted and forgotten that blooms when the season is right. I can’t stop wondering what, if anything, about who I’ve become was written inevitable into my chromosomes, lying in lurk, waiting for the apparently insignificant event that triggers an endless cascade of consequences. A thousand girls could have gotten through my seventh grade and breezed on with a laugh; I didn’t. I sometimes think I carried my unhappiness with me like a portmanteau, and finally unpacked it in the heart of an unfortunate year."
-skin game