This Damned Artery

My father always tells me how he mourns my potential. As a child, I was bright-eyed and gifted. I could have done such great things! Why did I have to throw it all away? He's convinced it's all a plot, just to spite him.

I mourn for who I could have been. When he regales me with stories of my childhood excellency all I can see is a little girl, shaking with fear, crying dry, heaving sobs at a shouting figure's feet. She didn't need to be yelled at, to be locked away, to be restrained or hurt. She needed someone safe, someone she could trust, to tell her it was alright. She needed to be held, she needed to be fed, she needed to live just one day without guilt. She needed to be protected.

I never could trust my parents. When given access to the internet, the first thing I did was make sure they couldn't track me. I wasn't older than eight. I researched suicide methods, and learned that people could kill themselves via overdose of medicines. I tried to off myself on melatonin pills, naively,  and multiple times, too. Of course, it never worked.

The first time I cut my wrists, I was probably around ten. I still wore two-piece, matching pajama sets with superheroes on them. I carved multiple slits into each arm with a shaving razor, then bandaged them so I wouldn't be found out. The scars have mostly healed now. Within the next few years, I decided that, in slitting my wrists with a weapon, I too closely ran the risk of being found out, so I decided to use my fingernails when on the go instead. I would scrape chunks of flesh out of my arms, widening the holes as I went. Faint scars still riddle me from this, oddly shaped and oddly placed. I remember feeling proud of them, back then.

Once graduated from Elementary School to Junior High, the stressors of change with my parents proved too much to bear, and once again I turned to the razor. This time, I sliced lines along the insides of my calves, close to my ankles where my socks would cover. I cut the lines deep, and often. I remember feeling generally dizzy from blood-loss.

The inability to trust my parents did not help me navigate the world of Junior High easily, if you can imagine it. My young self was accosted twice, at the ages of ten and eleven. I was sexually assaulted by two separate men, both older than me by at least three years. The first, I was only groped and threatened, before he made an attempt on my life. Unfortunately, he didn't succeed. With the second, the story gets more nuanced. Scarier.

 I was in a film club at the time, and there was a program with the nearby high school that made film students there come to our school to teach us. One of the student teachers was a boy who was much taller than me. He had big hands. We talked about shared interests often, to the point that I considered him a friend. Many of the kids my age teased me, and told me I was in love with him. Imagine my shock when, one day, I see a message from him in our school's messaging system. He had told me that he loved me. He told me he wanted me to be his girlfriend. He told me he wanted to kiss me. Who was I to say no?

The 'relationship' that followed was a difficult one. He threatened me when he saw me talking to male friends, told me that he'd hurt them if I got too close. He told his friends about me, and they got uncomfortable but laughed it off. We would all work together on film projects, but he would often take me aside in the library and ask me to do things for him. He would lift my shirt and grab my breasts. He took pictures.

That summer, I realized I was scared of him. I messaged him saying that my mother didn't want me dating him, so we had to break up. I told him we could stay friends. He was not happy about this, that his young girlfriend would leave him, but I blocked his number before he could complain. I stopped going to clubs at my school, and he lost contact with me. Good riddance.

Things started to get better as I got older and gained the ability to physically resist my parents. I slowly began to work on myself. At twelve, I was suddenly struck with an eating disorder so severe I thought I'd die. I still slip back under it from time to time. Starvation is a very powerful addiction. Currently, I am nearly two years self-harm free, and it's been around seven months since my last suicide attempt. I'm proud of these numbers.

My parents allowed my life to end before it had begun. I'm just sixteen and I've already had enough trauma and mental anguish to have me locked away. My brain has been broken, wired narcissistically and psychotically. I have nothing and no one but myself.