Part 2.

I was at a concert with my friends and I lost them in the mosh pit, when i went outside to call them a guy put a knife at my throat and started dragging me back into an alley. I’ve always been terrified that something like that would happen, call it my adhd’s “impending sense of doom,” so i was armed. I fought back, broke free and as i was running away the guy slashed at my back cutting really deep. At the hospital the doctor saw my scars and asked me if i was sure I didn’t do it myself and was making a cover up story.

It made think of why I stopped in the first place. I guess I didn’t feel so lonely, I didn’t feel like such a mess, I didn’t really feel like I needed to bleed.

But getting cut brought it all back, the fear of having my life taken away by someone else, that someone else could make me bleed, and somewhere i’d never cut either, it was the only part of my body without a scar, and now there’s a huge one.

Every night after that, sometimes even during the day, I whittled away at the patch of skin above my ankle. It started out as cutting, then it turned into skinning, because that produced much more blood. Until a month later, I passed out in my room, my friend got worried when i didn’t return her calls and got someone to check on me. At which point i was taken to the hospital, given a transfusion, and diagnosed with PTSD. I came home from university, and being surrounded by friends and family made it better, safer, and the cutting stopped again.