more about cutting

i started this post on the seventeenth, then let it rest a bit before adding the conclusion this morning for several reasons: i was ill, i was distracted and i wasn't sure what i was saying. i'm still not sure what i am saying, but i wanted to revisit the issue since it garnered what passes for attention on our website.

the most unusual thing about cutting is that the most unexpected people turn out to be cutters. (NB i'm using this term like people use "alcoholic" - if you do or did cut. also, i'm not saying it's like alcoholism. just that there is no discernment here between those who did and those who do, much like in alcoholics anonymous notions.)

there are people i have learnt are cutters than i never would have imagined, and others who are and whom i should have known were.

i also don't know i how feel about the pleasure aspect of cutting - and i'm not being rhetorical, i mean i really don't know. some people cut because they want to disfigure - pure and simple disfigurement. i cut because i was so desperate, i was hurting so bad, i needed it to come out. it hurt, it burned - that was the point - but i enjoyed it. i honestly did, and not because it was disfiguring. in fact, it was secret, i would have honestly been mortified if anyone found out (and i made sure no one ever did - i did not want the attention), and the point was private. it was about control, about how a new pain can overload your perception of another, pre-existing one, and about release.

i was miserable in my own body. i was agonised. it was a terror to awaken every morning and find out i was not in a bad dream. and i couldn't share these feelings with another human being, no one. there was no internet, no pamphlets, no one i knew to talk to it about, no doctors. nobody to let out the waves of emotion that were building into frenzied, panicked screams. all bottled up, nowhere to go. so i had genuine pleasure enduring a new pain, letting the pressure through hissed, curled lips.

i can see how cutting could be, for me, an addiction, but only because it would be like self-medication. but some people enjoy it; it enters a level of sado-masochistic behaviour. one woman, a cutter, writes of licking her lover's scars while rubbing off on her lover's leg. she found it sexy. i certainly find scars sexy; i find most everything about my lovers' bodies sexy. scars, freckles, toes long enough to type with, an asymmetrical breastbone, thumbs set to grip so wide they can touch their own wrists; all of these are part of what make a person unique. it seems, though, that there is more here - a connexion to a common solution to pain? fetishisation of the practice? i would trace old scars on a lover and ask about them, but i don't think it would arouse me that they were self-inflicted. i mean, scars are a part of the body, and i would find them sexy as such, but not specifically because they were cuts.

and as for getting turned on by the practice of cutting or by its fruits? i'm still not sure what that says to me. i just don't know.