MsNobody

I am 43, I used to cut myself when I was about 12 or 13. It was a release for me, it felt good, I was fascinated my the feel and the sight of it. I didn't have an eating disorder, I wasn't beaten...as a matter of fact I was and still am a very happy person. I am not bi-polar, nor do I suffer from any mental illness and never have. (though some people think I am a little strange) I don't have issues with my mother and I don't hate my father, we were not poor, we were upper middle class, I had a two best friends and about 14 friends.
It was not something I did all the time, actually there wasn't any "routine", I just did it when I felt like it. It was such an unimportant part of my life, I'd forgotten all about it until at a luncheon, I overheard some women talking and one of them said something about cutting and I remembered I used to do it. I still thought nothing of it. I called my sister one day and asked her if she remembered me doing it, she said, "yes, we would hide all the razor blades so you couldn't find them", now that surprised me, I really did not think anyone knew what I had been doing. I talked to some of my friends and this is even more surprising, out of the 11 people I talked to 9 were cutters, and none of us knew about the other.
I had never talked to anyone, not my family, my friends, not even my husband. I thought it was "just something I did", I outgrew it, or I should say I stopped doing it and hadn't even thought about it for years. Then cutting became a very important issue in my life - I realized my 12 year old daughter was a cutter.
Now it was no longer "something that I did", it was no longer "just a release for me", now it was something that I no longer had the control of, but I was damn sure going to make it stop.
My daughter will be 23 on Sunday, Mother's Day, she hasn't been a cutter for years, it took alot of encouragement, alot of patience, most definitely alot of love, a heck of alot of courage on her part - but it also took alot of soul searching for me to try and figure out why. I never did find the answer to my cutting, with all the therapy and talks and groups that my daughter and I attended, we never came to one reason for my daughters cutting as well.
I feel this is something that needs to be looked into a whole lot more. It is a problem, mostly because it is easily kept a secret, even from parents and there are thousands of people that do it, regularly - from every generation. There is not enough that is known about why, and maybe there never will be. But I think they need to make people more aware of it - there are people that have not even heard of it, which doesn't surprise me, but it does scare me.