A/N: Contains descriptions of self-harm, mentions of masochism, and general emotional termoil.

Bleed Like Me

Cut and dry. Same cut. Cut in, cut off, cutting words.

All these cut clichés, they just roll off your tongue everyday without you really thinking about their source. I have my own.

Cut and bleed.

Cut and bleed, bleed and cut. It’s all the same. Shallow. Flesh wounds. Not even that. Epidermis, barely. Just enough to

Cut, v. open up, penetrate, wound, or divide with a sharp instrument; divide; trim or shape by cutting; abridge.

let the blood well up.

It always takes a moment. That’s why cutting takes practice. You can tell when they’re new, because the cuts are haphazard, all over. You think you’ve just scratched, not broken the skin. But it takes a minute for the blood to come to the surface. You don’t know that when you first do it, so it you cut a lot more than you really intended.

But you get the hang of it.

(I hurt myself today)

Cut and bleed.

(to see if I still feel)

I cut and bleed. I bleed and cut. It makes me feel better. It gives me a rush, a sense of relief. I can look at that blood – if there’s enough I can smear it down my arm or my face – and I can prove that I’m like you. I’m normal, because I cut myself.

(I focus on the pain)

I want to be hurt. I want to be cut. I want to be bruised and bleeding. I find…not pleasure. It doesn’t bring me pleasure. But it…makes me feel safe. It makes me feel…protected. Cared for.

(the only thing that’s real)

No one’s ever hurt me. Ironic, really, that I should be the first. My parents never laid a hand on me, not even in punishment. When people picked on me, they did it with words, not fists. The nearest I’ve ever come to anyone hurting me is my ex-boyfriend giving me the occasional slap on the bum.

He didn’t get it. Why I

Masochism [mass-oh-kiz-zum] n. condition in which (sexual) pleasure is derived from feeling pain or being humiliated.

feel the need to be hurt.

This latest time, I was just bored.

That sounds pathetic. “I cut myself because I was bored.” I sound like such an attention seeker. But you don’t understand, you don’t get it. To most people, boredom is an emotion, something

Emotion, n. strong feeling.

to be endured, or cured. To me, boredom is dangerous. My boredom is all encompassing. When I get bored, bad things happen.

I cut and bleed.

It shuts my head up. It makes things quieter and louder all at once. There is this exquisite ecstasy of pain, of watching the blood well up to the surface in little beads of red.

It’s beautiful.

The sexual thing came after.

Pain always appealed to me. I was the kind of little girl always jumping off the top of monkey bars in the hope of getting a broken arm (the worst I ever got was a sprained ankle). The kind of little girl who longed to get a cold, not so I could stay off school, but just for the experience of being sick (I used to stay out in the rain, to weaken my immune system. I got dozens of colds in my childhood. I don’t get ill anymore, but I still stand out in the rain).

When I was two, I dislocated my elbow. It’s my earliest memory. The bone poked out of the skin. I remember the screaming of my childminder. She called my parents home from work and they rushed me to casualty. The doctor fixed it in minutes.

My parents always say that the thing that scared them most was not that my bone was poking out of my skin, but that I didn’t cry. Didn’t scream. I giggled.

I don’t remember that, but I remember the bone. Sticking out of my skin. I remember the red of the blood.

It was so fucking beautiful.

That was probably the beginning of my obsession with pain. I assume it was – it was certainly the most serious injury I ever had.

It wasn’t sexual then, obviously. I was two years old, how sick would that have been? But I always thought bruises were beautiful. Blood and bruises.

I don’t bruise easy.

It wasn’t until I was maybe nearly sixteen that I even had any kind of inclination that it was anything sexual. It wasn’t until a few months before my seventeenth birthday that I started to look up things like it on the web.

Now I crave it. Ordinary porn does nothing for me. A guy and girl going at it, panting and moaning and screaming, not even damp.

But spanking. Bondage. That produces an ocean.

Even if there’s no sex. Even if it’s a punishment thing, not a kinky thing, it still turns me on. Is that weird? Well, the internet can prove to you that whatever your kink, you’re not alone. There are hundreds of websites devoted to this kind of stuff. And they’ve made me feel less alone than any person I’ve ever talked to face-to-face about my problems.

I’m bisexual, you know. Because it suits me best. When I find the person who can deal with me, high-maintenance, self-destructive, masochist, defiantly submissive me, I’m going to stay with them, whether they’re male, female. Hell, they could be twice my age, but if they can deal with me, give me what I want when I’m not even sure what that is, then they’re going to be it.

Someone who can cause me pain without hurting me.

I’m trying to explain it in a way that you can understand. But really, you can’t understand unless you’re like me. Self-harming. Masochistic. Weird.

Weird, adj. strange or bizarre; unearthly or eerie.

But when I cut myself, it’s not sexual. It doesn’t turn me on. It stings. It gives me relief. It makes me feel like a human being, because I can be hurt.

It relaxes me. Calms me down when I’m getting into one of my ‘fits’ as my father calls them. Bleeding is therapeutic. Dragging a razor across my skin makes me feel more normal than any and every single counselling session and psychoanalysis I’ve ever been to.

I’m not suicidal. That needs to be said, in case you’re getting the wrong impression. My parents aren’t going to wake up one morning to find me with my wrists slit, Evanescence playing in the background, and my father’s razor dropped into my bloody lap. I’ve only ever wished I was dead once, and that was when my shrink had me on anti-psychotics with such horrible side-effects that I wished I was dead just so I’d feel better. So, no, I’m not suicidal.

Sometimes, I think people wish that I were.

I mean, it’s a far easier concept for them to grasp. I think they’d prefer it if I were cutting myself because I wanted to die, instead of the reason I do do it.

Because not even I can articulate why I do it, and that leaves them feeling helpless and confused. Impotent.

I did try. Once. To explain why I self-harm; how I don’t know why I do it, but I feel that if I keep on doing it, I’ll find out the answer why I feel this way, and then I’ll be able to stop, and I’ll be better, but I don’t think they got it.

And that’s understandable. Self-harm is one of those things that you really can’t empathise with. You have to have done it.

And I don’t mean just slapping yourself or slicing up your arm. I mean you need to have felt the myriad of emotions that comes with the elusive persona of ‘Cutter’. It’s not good enough just to hurt yourself. You have to want to hurt yourself. You have to desire it, to want to go there, to that dark place of own-spilled blood and self-inflicted pain.

And I don’t like the term ‘Cutter’ anyway. A ‘cutter’, to me, is someone who does it because they want the attention. Because they like to shock. A cutter boasts about it, and shows the scars. A cutter is the typical society stereotype of an emo; someone who writes ‘deep’ poetry about death, someone drowning in pseudo-angst. Someone who flaunts it.

What we do, as self-harmers, is utterly different.

I don’t like emo stereotypes either. I saw this brilliant thing on DeviantArt the other day; it was this picture of an emo – long fringe, stripy gloves, etc – but with the words “I may be emo, but I can break your face.” I laughed for a good minute at that. Kudos to whoever made it. That sums it up for me.

We self-harm because we crave it. It is a private, personal thing.

And that’s what’s dangerous about us. We can be the most smiley, cheery people on the planet. You will never know what we’re doing.

It’s a secret.

Secret, n. something kept from the knowledge of others; mystery.

Do you understand me yet? Even the slightest, do you understand the way I think? It’s twisted and distorted, but it’s mine.

I cut my face once. I remember looking in the mirror, a jagged drop of blood zigzagging down my face, and I laughed and said to my reflection, “Am I the only sane person in the world?”

That’s what I feel like.

Cut and bleed.

Bleed, v. bleeding, bled. lose or emit blood.

You should see my scars
You should see my scars
You should see my scars
You should see my scars
And try to comprehend that which you’ll never comprehend
And try to comprehend that which you’ll never comprehend

A/N: The song at the beginning and end is Bleed Like Me, by Garbage. The lyrics in bold are from Hurt by Nine Inch Nails. The definitions are from a Collins English dictionary. Please review. I know it was a bit different from my usual fare. But review, even if it's just to tell me that you hated it. If anyone can give me a review showing the understand the way I've written and formatted this story, I'd appreciate it. I know it seemed a bit choppy at times.