At sixteen, I devoured books about troubled children—teens breaking with reality, kids like me, suffering and healing. The Best Little Girl in the World. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. The Bell Jar. Ms. Hammaren, the school librarian, aware of my interest in psychology, fed me these books. At lunch, when I wasn’t at home unable to get out of bed, I sat in a carrell at the back of the library, chewing a turkey-and-mayo sandwich, reading, while my seemingly carefree classmates cavorted in the cafeteria. The reason I read: I wanted to see these fictional kids make it through to the other side. I needed that promise. At the same time, the danger within these pages was contagious.

I had long fantasized about drilling a hole in my head to release the pressure building inside and allow the misery to drain out. Not that I wanted to hurt myself; rather, I longed for relief. Then I read Lisa, Bright and Dark. It was the story of a girl going mad—the misguided word used at the time to describe patients suffering from depression, psychosis, and unrelenting psychic pain. She had days of normalcy and others of utter darkness. I thought—I feared—I was like Lisa. This must be what was happening. I was losing my mind. I was wrong inside. The problem was situated within me. If only I could exorcise it. In the book, Lisa walks through a sliding-glass door, oblivious to the glass breaking all around her. I was fascinated by this. Obsessed with this fantasy:

I put my hands against the cold glass, a thin transparent boundary separating me from the outside world. This window holds me in. It is my prison. I cannot punch through the walls, but I can break free of this place—my house—by putting my fists through the window. I ball up my hand, tight, pull it backward, and let it fly. The window breaks away from my fist, its sharp edges cutting into my wrist and forearm from all sides. The blood is plentiful and streaking everything. I have broken open my body. Perhaps now I can escape.

I did not know how I should cut myself. At the time, there was no internet to give me detailed instructions: what instruments to use, where to cut, which veins were safe. I was not part of a dark clan of kids who shared their methods of self-destruction. Improvising, I gathered pins, a book of matches, and a Dixie cup. I thought to myself: I will bleed into this cup. It was important to me to be neat and hygienic about it. This was not about staging a messy scene, trying to capture the attention of others. It was affirmation that I was alive, that I was in control. It was bloodletting, releasing what poisoned me. It was a therapeutic act, but without the ugliness of leaches. Perhaps there was even a gothic desire to hang on to my blood. Like wearing a vial of a lover’s blood around one’s neck to keep a fragment of that person—I wanted evidence that I was real.

If you prick me, do I not bleed?

 I lit a match. The smell of sulfur met my nose with a slight burn. The heat licked at my fingers. I held the pin in the flame as long as I could stand it. The sharp length of the pin turned black. With ash? Was that sterile? I shook the match dead, like I had watched my father do so many times with a flash of his hand as he lit a cigarette or a joint. I quickly stabbed the pin into the veiny topography of my wrist and I was surprised to find it did not hurt.  Brilliant red blood burst forth to the surface of my skin in a bubble. So beautiful. Hypnotized and at peace, I watched it run down my wrist leaving a thin trail like raindrops on a car window. Much thicker than water—viscous—it took a long time to drip into the cup. I did not want it to end. I was not sure how to end it.

There came a point where I felt calm and satisfied. I looked at my wrist and thought, Poor baby. You hurt yourself. I need to take care of you. I went into the bathroom closet and grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a Band-Aid. I took them into my room and behind a closed door, I sat cross-legged on the floor and cleansed myself with alcohol, dabbing gently at the wound. I  covered the small punctures with the bandage. This small act of tending to myself proved to be the most seductive part.

I felt a wash of self-love spread through me. Caring for my wound was like hugging myself, or whispering that it would be okay, but a thousand times more potent. I was actually making it okay, taking my broken self and patching me up. This hadn’t been in any book, so I felt pride in having figured out where, how, to find comfort when I needed it. Not from my drug-addled father. Not from my dissolving mother. Not from my deadbeat boyfriend who never came when he said he would come, never called when he said he would call, and then would suddenly show, expecting sex. I didn’t need anyone to take care of me. I would take care of myself.

I didn’t save the blood. There would be more. I had vented my spleen, but it held red blood cells in reserve. I washed it down the sink, where it would mingle in the sewers with the other toxic substances excreted from the bodies in our household. I packed my first aid kit—the needle, the matches, the rinsed Dixie cup, the antiseptic, and a fistful of bandages—in a shoebox and stored it under my bed. Eventually I would add a thin disposable blade from my father’s razor and my mother’s blue-handled paring knife from kitchen cutlery. Though cutting offered temporary relief, the root of my pain, my sense of isolation and otherness, never ablated, grew.  The knowledge that my kit was close and available made me feel safe.

Twelve years later, I pursued a doctorate in psychology. I wore long sleeves to class, fearful that someone would notice my left wrist and arm crisscrossed with thin white scars. I imagined a peer or a professor standing and pointing, you do not belong here, and then being stoned or shunned like fellow sufferers in the books I had read. By this time, having had a decade of therapy, I knew I was not mad—not crazy—but the fear of that stigma lingered. There seemed to be a clear and unspoken division between the ill (them) and the healers (us). We talked about mental illness—harmful dysfunction—as an affliction of others. We did not talk about our own worn genes, our own battered pasts. I did not tell anyone that I still had my first aid kit tucked away in the art deco vanity I inherited from my grandmother when she moved into a nursing home. It was only there in case of emergencies—a blistering argument with my boyfriend, a suicide attempt by my research chemist father who was finally fired from his job after years of erratic behavior. Anything that smacked of alienation of affection or loss of love still sent me under the knife to cope. I felt like an imposter. A fraud. How could I do for others what I could not do for myself? More than anything, I wanted to become the person I needed when I was young.

Because I kept my cutting hidden, it was permitted to live, albeit anemically. I learned to express what I felt, and the moments where I turned my anger against myself diminished. My relationship with my boyfriend—a fellow student and future psychologist—deepened. I finally decided I didn’t want to keep my secret from him any longer. I showed him the kit with its blue-handled paring knife. He didn’t think I was crazy. He was grateful for my trust. We cried. He made me throw it out. He let me know that he was my emergency first aid from then on. Years of therapy likely primed me for this moment, but it was this single act of care combined with the mix of love and pain in his eyes that enabled me to give up cutting for once and for all. He let me know: I was no longer alone.

Melissa Brand is a writer and psychologist practicing in Philadelphia. She is passionate about supporting parents and providing services for children who are neurodiverse, have experienced trauma, or are struggling to cope. Her work has appeared in Entropy, JMWW Journal and Motherwell. She is a Rutgers Camden MFA alum and is currently working on a memoir related to this essay.