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.