Confession

I've cut. I did it right after I got dumped last February. I was sick of hurting and knowing that you can't do anything to help a broken heart heal any faster. I wanted to put bandaids on something and be able to pretend I was doing any good at all. I cut twice that month.

I cut a few times over the summer too. I was spending a lot of my time outside of CoOp with my friends in Virginia, and my ex was part of that group. He was being a real jerk to me for no reason that I could think of. He dumped me, so I have no idea why he was being so awful. I was hating myself for still loving him when he was being such a jerk, and I sought release and bandaids again.

It's been about two months since the last time. That really means nothing, because it was four months between February and when I started again in summer. When I stopped feeling depressed about a month ago, I thought I might be far enough past those horrible feelings that I would be able to regulate my daily emotions and stress without turning back to self injury. Something has come up again which makes me worry that it's a near-future possibility I will cut again.

You don't have to worry that criticism of my screenplay will be taken personally or put me at risk. I've tried to make Elizabeth's circumstances different enough from mine that apparently, while I was feeling safe and happy, I lost my reason for caring about her. But my work is sucking so far. My last truly good screenplay work was also inspired by my life, and I played it much closer to home but still came out of it feeling the character was very separate from me. It was like I was a big bubble and I pinched until that work was another little bubble next to me. I'm thinking there's a real possibility that I will chose to scrap a lot of the elements and basically start over on Elizabeth's story over Turkey Break or Winter Break.

And please don't worry about my sanity or anything. If I hadn't told you, you probably would never have suspected anything. I just needed an extreme self-regulation and coping method, and I'm trying to be done with it. They were basically deep scratches and part of what helped me was the process of cleaning and bandaging them. You're welcome to try to psychoanalyze me, but I wasn't abused as a child, and it's obviously not attention-seeking behavior because I'm usually trying to hide it.

Elizabeth's Confidante, pt 2

Okay, I cut Elizabeth down to one sister. Hannah is more socially outgoing than Elizabeth and probably prettier, but in a cute way that should be hard to hate or be consciously jealous of. I didn't exactly give her a smart sounding voice, but I think there's still room in her characterization for her to have a tiny edge over her sister's academic achievement. I wrote her younger, young enough that growing up Elizabeth probably had to look after her for several years and wait for Hannah to catch up. That kind of history can put a strain on siblings, and I'm hoping Elizabeth comes off as the type to downplay and hide that strain, but it's probably still there a little.

If she doesn't, tell me, let's make notes, and then I have concrete things to fix next term. I really need to be keeping a legit record of the notes and advice I receive on each section of script so I know exactly what's most important to change next term, although changing those things will invariably change billions of tiny things throughout the script, it would nice to know what major things were most bothersome in this very first version of things.

Elizabeth needs a confidante.

I'm trying to tailor Elizabeth's character into the kind of person who believably doesn't make new friends easily, so she's down to just a few by the "first job" point in her life. I think that the harmful emotional coping/controlling habit of self-harm is psychologically more likely in someone who doesn't have a good social support network, whether because of quality or quantity.

However, Elizabeth needs a confidante so that the script can have dialog mixed in with the action of Elizabeth acting mildly manic-depressive because she cuts and can somehow pretend to be normal when she "empties out" her depressive feelings. So, should I bring in a best friend who has doggedly maintained the friendship through things that most other friends melted away because of, like moving and getting full-time careers? Or should Elizabeth's confidante be a sister?
          And if sister: older, younger? Is the sister prettier, higher achieving, both? I wrote Elizabeth's bio so she had two sisters, one prettier, one "smarter," but she doesn't need two, as long as there's one around to make her secretly feel inferior while she expresses pride in her sister; one whom her parents seem to love more, even though parents really love all their kids the same amount.

Right so: are we going for a super-friend, or a sister? Should I show reasons why Elizabeth is messed up inside, or should I give her a best friend/foil with a really social friend who makes damn sure to maintain their college or high school friendship?

Remember when I said I was feeling depressed?

I have just discovered that maybe to write this script, I need to be depressed. And that sucks because I'm not anymore. Something snapped back to rights on Monday and I have felt much better the whole week. Unfortunately, I find I no longer care about writing Elizabeth's story or giving her a happy ending. I'm not feeling mean like I want to kill her off, I just don't care about her. That's really bad because now I'm married to her for another term and a half, and I have to write nearly 120 pages about her. Making decisions about what to spend six months writing when one is depressed is a bad idea, especially when one is merely going through a depressive period and could snap out of it like I just did.

Remember how I said I spun out the idea of Elizabeth and exaggerated and embellished it from a kernel of my depressive self? Yeah... so, I used to feel connected to her because I saw potential for me to end up going down such dark roads... And now I'm not depressed and I don't feel that connection anymore. Oh! So that's what Prof Bronte meant. Right-o, if I can make her someone I care about again, then I'll have fixed that problem.

Writing Music: it helps me get inside character's heads.

This song has a pretty similar sentiment to how Elizabeth feels at the start of the script.

I am horribly disorganized in the spatial sense, I shall have to fix this.

I lost the syllabus which outlined which milestones were due at the end of which weeks. Actually, I have lost three of my five syllabi, which is okay for the other two, since we go over the assignments at the end of each class, but not okay for Workshop, since we don't meet that often. I am suddenly worried about keeping my grades high enough for my scholarship this term, since it takes a 3.0 to keep it, and I don't know if that's cumulative or per term. So I'm assuming it's the worse prospect, per term, and worrying. This will make me search for the syllabus harder and then hyper-awesome to finish whatever assignment was due this week. And hopefully it's one that I already have half done so I don't have to turn it in far too late to be worth even turning in, but really, even if it's too late to earn a grade, it's worth getting the input.

Also, the issue I mentioned toward the very end of my last post, should I plan characters who can give me a "happy" ending, or should I let my dysthymia create characters who are going to lead to Elizabeth's death or institutionalization?

I feel depressed

This may or may not be a good thing for writing about Elizabeth. On the one hand, maybe it puts me more in her head to have low self-worth right now. On the other hand, the last time I tried to work on a screenplay while depressed, it sucked.

I think my primary reason for feeling depressed is that I am still trying to nurse a broken heart back to health, and I have been for the past eight months. Sometimes I get it wrapped up tight in a cast and it feels alright for a few days, maybe a week; but then all it takes is one tiny thing to make me crumble, like feeling lonely because my friends are too busy with production classes and starting their senior production projects. Sometimes it's that boy who makes me crumble, because I do occasionally talk to him in an effort to say I want to try to be friends, even if it takes a while to be able to do so properly again. Advice: never date a friend unless you can be sure that you really both feel the same and you truly believe you will both continue to feel the same. The stupid boy only had a crush on me and I fell for him completely.

It would be all too easy right now to decide to change Elizabeth's story. Instead of asking her boyfriend/solution for space to fix herself, I could let my pessimistic attitude about love rewrite the entire second half of my story. Let's say, he dumps her because he can see she's faking being better, and that just makes her worse. Now she's got even more reasons to feel pointless and worthless, so maybe instead of finding her way to stop cutting, she cuts more because she hurts more. But if I let my pessimism rewrite the story, will it still be possible to heal her by the end? Will I end up writing that she was taken away for in-patient psychotherapy? Will I end up writing a suicide scene?

I feel like I need to find a way to heal Elizabeth by the end, no matter what I write her through in the middle, because I'm the kernel that I twisted and exaggerated and spun out into the concept of her. I like happy endings because they make me believe that they can happen in real life if I can just last long enough.

Some Background

"The motivations for self-harm vary and may be used to fulfill a number of different functions. These functions include self-harm being used as a coping mechanism which provides temporary relief of intense feelings such as anxiety, depression, stress, emotional numbness and a sense of failure or self-loathing."


"Self-harm is often associated with a history of trauma and abuse including emotional abuse, sexual abuse, drug dependence, eating disorders, or mental traits such as low self-esteem or perfectionism."


"Self-harm is most common in adolescence and young adulthood, usually first appearing between the ages of 14 and 24. However, self-harm can occur at any age, including in the elderly population."


"Self harm is not limited to humans. Captive non-human animals are also known to participate in self-mutilation, such as captive birds and monkeys."


"Although suicide is not the intention of self-harm, the relationship between self-harm and suicide is complex, as self-harming behavior may be potentially life-threatening. There is also an increased risk of suicide in individuals who self-harm to the extent that self-harm is found in 40–60% of suicides. However, generalizing self-harmers to be suicidal is, in the majority of cases, inaccurate."


All this information can be found in the first three paragraphs of the Wikipedia article on Self-Harm.


Elizabeth, my character, has been pressuring herself to do well ever since she can remember. She's a perfectionist. And now she finds herself stuck in a horrible job, wasting her education, and rather alone from neglecting her social skills in order to keep up her achievement. She's a perfectionist who just got slapped in the face with the fact that she can never be "perfect" living like this. She's had nervous habits since she began pressuring herself, mostly tending toward pulling tangles from her hair, picking at scabs, biting her fingers, and squeezing the occasion stubborn pimple until it pops. When the realization of her complete non-perfection hits her, Elizabeth feels numb. She's surreally calm for someone whose self-worth has just been invalidated. The only thing that snaps her back to at least pretending to be cheerful around others is self-harm. Gathering her first aid materials and blade of choice, she's already trance-like. She can't feel the cuts in her skin until she sees the blood well up. Then she meticulously cleans and bandages them. She is cutting for relief, but the thought of suicide has never entered her mind. Death isn't perfect, and it's like giving up or admitting defeat. Death is cowardly; it's leaving others to clean up the mess.

First Aid

Iodine stings like the dickens, but that's how you know it's healing you.

FIRST!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, yes I just did that. I thought the title was cute and funny. Oh well.

Anyway, I'm writing a screenplay and it's about this girl. Lots of screenplays are about girls. Okay, girl isn't right, but she's not exactly a woman. Let's say "young lady." So there's this young lady, and she has been cutting to cope with stress, anxiety, and her lack of control over most outward aspects of her life. You're going to be confused, because she may seem cheerful, but that's after cutting. Leading up to each time she cuts, she gets more withdrawn and fidgety, and then she cuts and she seems happy again.

I don't want you to assume that because she's cutting, she's suicidal and depressed all the time. She's not seeking attention either, she's been hiding the fact that she cuts. Those are both valid things to connect to cutting, psychologically speaking, but that's not her. She's the kind who gets misinterpreted. Pressure needs a release valve, and sometimes that fails, and that's when otherwise stupid things like self-mutilation seems like a good idea.

If you are confused yet, that's good. I want you thinking. I want to make you reevaluate the stereotypes that keep cutters like my character ashamed and in hiding.