Self-Harm Was My Secret For 20 Years

But I found my way out of it

Trigger warning: This essay contains content related to self-harm, suicide, and emotional abuse.

I used to cut myself in middle school. I don’t remember why I did it, but I knew it was something that had to be done. The girls who were older than me were doing it. The girls who were dating guys who were popular were doing it. One girl used to take a compass and ask her friend to cut her on her calves. Since we wore short pinafores to school, the red welts on her leg were visible to everyone, a sign that she’d done something to show that she loved her boyfriend — and would do anything for him. Later, I learned that there were rules to cutting. Most of the girls used shaving razors, compasses, or shards of glass to cut their bodies — forearms, thighs, calves, palms — but the most important rule was that you should never use a blade to slit your wrists.

Not unless you were really, really serious.

By the time I was sixteen, I grew out of cutting. I figured I couldn’t follow through with slicing my body up because it hurt, and also, I was pretty scared. But the other girls I grew up with still did it, sometimes using their blood to write to their boyfriends on paper or willfully trying to break their arms with hockey sticks. Only recently did I learn that a lot of women cut themselves for no reason. (Although studies around non-suicidal self-harm (NSSI) point out that people — mostly women — use it as a way to cope with stress and trauma). But back then, in the wilderness that was my adolescence, I didn’t think twice about it.

I didn’t even see my body as an extension of myself.

See, the cultural landscape I grew up in narrowly defined emotions. In India back in the late 80s and 90s, advertisements always made it seem as if emotions were so simple that they could be contained in cards: I’m sorry, I miss you, I love you, Thank you, I’m grateful. In the movies, women’s emotions were neither complex nor fraught. Usually, there were leads who were broken-hearted, or unhappy in their marriages or career women who found out (in the end) that their life was meaningless without romance. Even female characters in paperbacks sold to women suffered from the same malaise — traumatized, or deceptive, or desperate, or so overbearing that their hopes and dreams often related to escape and marriage, nothing more. Oh, and Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steele novels, which were widely popular when I was a teenager, almost always centered around a female lead who was beautiful but psychologically damaged.

Perhaps it should have been no surprise to me then that so many girls I grew up with had a flawed relationship with themselves as if to be worthy of love a woman must be pained and broken and haunted. But for the most part, I too believed it was necessary, that pain is important for love to mean something.

I didn’t question my own understanding of love until I was sitting in a therapist’s office in 2018. Sixteen years after I took a blade to my fingers. I was thirty-two, pregnant, and had quit my last office job at a non-profit. I had, at that time, already suffered from three significant burnouts at work. I was also recovering from years of illness-related isolation — Lyme Disease, Cervical Dystonia, Arthritis, and a dark, crippling depression. I was classified as a High-Risk Pregnancy. My therapist, Margot, sat me down and asked me to talk about myself. And as if a doorway opened to some bizarre underworld within me, I found myself telling her about this secret life I led.

I told her about the time I swallowed a whole handful of paracetamols when I was fourteen just to see what would happen to me if I did. In 1998, when our school demanded that all the kids carry portable water filters, I went through a phase where I’d just drink contaminated water to see if I’d get Hepatitis A. In 2008, I began pulling out my hair after I fell seriously sick with vasculitis. Chronic illness was wearing me down, but I was determined to destroy my own body because the disease got me. This habit lasted way into my thirties — with my husband yelling, and sometimes literally holding my hands so that I wouldn’t pull my hair out.

Why did you want to do it? Margot asked.

I didn’t know.

Only months into those sessions, when I began to excavate my memory, did I make sense of my behavior, of my childhood. Of how the language of trauma shaped my relationship with my body.

Let me first say this. Trauma is defined by the American Psychological Association as an “emotional response to a terrible event.” These events don’t just include accidents, natural disasters, sexual assault, torture, war, imprisonment, and so on but also distressing events that can impact a person’s ability to cope and function in their day-to-day lives. Think emotional abuse, bullying, and racism. Love is defined as “a complex emotion involving strong feelings of affection and tenderness…”

But when I think about trauma or love in my childhood, I don’t necessarily think of single events. The memories surface at random. For instance, I think of the shame I felt when my teacher slapped me hard in fourth grade because I couldn’t solve a fraction. Or the rage I suppressed when my dad and I argued about his views on women. I think of the frustration I felt when I received rude letters from my mum in high school. Or the terror when my tuition teacher molested me during lessons. I recognize these moments as essential to my transformation to adulthood, as ingredients that molded the personality that I have today. It is when I was encouraged to take these moments apart, pry deeper into each memory, that I learned why these situations mattered so much to me, and how they shaped the relationship I had with my body.

One, in most of my memories of childhood, there was always power at play. And love was a transaction. Like most girls I knew, I grew up loathing the idea of talking to adults because children were taught that adults were right. The idea that a child is a person who should learn boundaries or develop the ability to make decisions for themselves was unheard of in the conservative Hindu community I grew up in. So until I was eighteen, I didn’t know that being yelled at constantly or being at the receiving end of violent outbursts of rage was emotional abuse. I just thought it was normal. My girlfriends had conversations with parents the same way I did:

“I did it for your own good.” “I yelled at you because I care about you.” “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad but there’s no other way you’d learn.” “You are ungrateful. You are selfish.” “If you do this, you don’t love me.” “You don’t care about your family.”

The lesson you have to learn, Margot said one morning, is that love should not make you anxious, or fill you with paranoia, or insecurity or demand you deliver something. Love, in fact, is supposed to offer the opposite.

Every day since she told me that, I repeat it. I think of it when I feel the urge to pull my hair, or reach for painkillers, or feel that irritation when my daughter throws her food on the ground. I think of it when I look into her eyes and see them light up. I think of it whenever my husband leans over and throws his arm around me and says, “Want to share an ice-cream sammy?” whenever I get a sugar craving.

Looking back, self-harm was an extension of the world around me. The anxiety I felt as a child grew inside me over several years, a parasitic vine that was slowly strangling my physical form.

But I cut the weed out, I refuse to offer it to my body anymore.