Borderline Diary - The First Cut Is The Deepest
The Diary - My Borderline Years - The First Cut Is The Deepest
Cutting myself feels. Cutting myself makes the feel real. The first cut is the deepest. The first cut is the emotional experience that screws me right up. The first cut comes always from someone else. It isn't my fault. I don't do it. I don't ask for it. People just deliver it to me constantly - treating me like shit.
Slighted By a Room-mate - Feeling Misunderstood
September 7, 1975
4:55pm
All I did was try to take a shower. How can I be in her shower at her time when there are no rules - no rules I understand or really care about for sure? Life in the dorm so like life in my crazy family at home. Freaky eerie how similar they really are. What does that mean? She pissed me off. She treated me like shit. She wondered why I screamed at her. Who the hell does she think she is? She got what she deserved and then so did I.
The first cut is the deepest. The first cut is the way that everyone hurts me. The first cut is the way that there isn't anything fair in or about my stinking life. The first cut is the way that all that I can't stand to feel washes over me. I drown in it all. I need to NOT feel it. It feels like it will kill me.
The first cut is overwhelming feelings that I have no control over and that have nothing to do with me - they aren't my fault. The next cut is my response. The second cut is when my right hand, abandoning the rest of my body, manipulates the razor it holds and rips into my flesh.
The angst is killing me. How I feel is killing me. I can't stand this. I simply can't, stand this anymore. People just don't get it. People just don't understand me. They look at me like I am the one that's crazy. What the f**k do they know anyway?
I feel so much that I just can't feel anything anymore. I feel so much that I feel this horrible gut-wrenching pain-filled numbness. The razor's edge cuts both ways. It cuts me physically - it cuts me even more somewhere deep inside - a place so deep I know somewhere inside that I am cut-off from it.
The razor's slice as it cuts my flesh is the transition of my pain from invisible to visible - from feeling unreal to an obvious reality that matters. That first cut, always the sweetest. Always hurts in such a welcoming, safe, and predictable way.
I watch the blood flow. It is my blood. I feel removed from it. I feel hot and fuzzy. I feel closely-distant. A part of me feels such relief because as the blood flows a part of me is crying. The part of me that is crying is the part of me that is always dying.
© A.J. Mahari 1975 - All rights reserved.
I am writing my memoir about my life as a child of borderline parents, a person diagnosed with BPD and my recovery from BPD. You can check on its progress, up-dates, and up-coming excerpts by going to ajmahari.ca
Please note: This was written when I had BPD and was in the active throes of BPD. I do not want to suggest at all that this was the most effective way to cope or that this is the way that I would recommend coping. It is, however, a way that many with BPD do cope in the absence of knowing any other way to cope.
In my recovery from BPD I stopped cutting and all self-harm and have maintained that for over 12 years now. So, if you have BPD, please know that you can learn other ways to cope with the pain that you feel or the pain that is so overwhelming you don't feel it at all.
© A.J. Mahari, July 14, 2008
Comments