Content notice: this essay discusses certain types of self-harm, not in detailed ways. Take care of yourselves as you read 🖤
The reality is that we don’t openly talk about our worst multidimensional states, out of fear for the repercussions, out of the fear of people not understanding, out of the embodied terror that the worst of our experiences must be kept hidden.
I think we have good reasons for these fears. Today, I was reminded that those reasons may be outdated for what is needed now, for what stories the timeline inches towards.
This essay is about self-harm, self-violence. This essay is connected to how we understand the spectrum of suicidality, which we refer to as ‘having a deathwish’.
This essay is not about having a deathwish, or how it even manifests for us in our multiplicity. This essay is connected to death, as everything is, yet it is merely a hat tip, gesturing of intimate interconnection, without actually dying.
This is an essay about self-harm, self-violence (which we shorten to sh/v), but it could just be an essay about pain, with a known origin: one of us. How do you manage the pain on both sides, inflicted and inflicting. How do you manage the pain when you are in the aftermath, carrying all the loose ends waving in the wind, buried in the tree branches.
Is the pain even in the body at that point? What is a body after an experience of sh/v? What is a body once it’s been torn apart, slice by slice, swing after swing, no floor hard enough, no wall stiff enough. What is a body, then after and then the next day.
Do you own the bruises? Do you own your skin? Skin is just a magical web, a mystery, and sometimes the stars color the freckles, like lost constellation puzzles etched in our skin. The world tells us we should feel ashamed, and we do in bellowing spirals cosmically.
The secret is the unknown known, that our body breaks and bends, and sometimes, it just screams. I scream along with it, and then they meet the pain. Like a container trying to catch the rain. The fire burns, and soon the screams have competition. The pain disciplines us feverishly, like an older sibling trying to silence the smallest explosion, post-exploding.
It was never safe to be us. However, that showed up before we knew the words we know now. It had so many names and forms: psychosis, mania, rage episodes, meltdowns. Distinctively, all those words are considered different experiences, however that distinction only sticks in the textbooks and the neat checkboxes on forms meant to keep us safe.
Those forms did not keep us safe. Those forms kept us surveilled by the psychiatric industrial complex. That’s it. Nothing more than a capitalistic theft of our internal consciousness placed into statistical analysis, with models that gave us nothing.
These forms did not keep us safe.
We kept us safe.
Also,
Some of us hurt others in this body.
Some of us hurt ourselves.
Some of us tried to stop the violence.
Some of us spoke up about it to doctors.
and therapists.
And they just locked us up. As someone recently said, they kidnapped us.
See, this is why essays on sh/v are not as simple as just don’t do it.
Just stop.
Just stop.
Just. Stop.
I know that we can’t stop because it is not as simple as stopping one person from doing one thing to their body. It is the complicated dynamic of coping skills that turned into desperation of controlling the uncontrollable, the ones of us with a deathwish. Different aspects of the deathwish were carried by all of us, though the biggest pieces, with the sharpest edges, were carried by just a handful of us. A few at most. I think we thought we were protecting us, in a way that only we could understand.
It was not until the recent years that we had language to accurately describe our experience with clarity. Before knowing words about multiplicity and madness, we tried to explain the instances around sh/v as reflexive, with the caveat, that it felt like our body had a mind of its own.
Imagining it as not being able to stop yourself from doing something to yourself, is not quite the exact experience we were articulating. When multiplicity is unknown explicitly, rather implicitly misclassified as psychosis, nothing about our lived experience could be trusted to have its own wisdom, its own inherent space of knowing. How to properly explain to anyone the feeling of depersonalization, not only at a full body level but also on a piecemeal experience, as if our limbs are no longer ours.
That’s not my arm cutting me.
That is not my closed fist making contact.
How could I hurt my head for I am headless.
To those external of this body, what they witnessed was a tornado affair, an explosion of terror splattering the walls, silenced by closed fists and brick walls. We were bloody and bruised, yet unbowed.
We learned this body motto from a poem. Sometimes, most often, poetry saves lives. It saved our life, and our many lives together.
Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
It was the last line in the second stanza that became our body’s motto, like a fight song that echoed in our ears. A sounding alarm when the sh/v started, like a flash warning across the sky, anticipating the coming storm. The ones that tell you to take cover, to take shelter. Our expressions came out like tornados, quickly touching down for mass destruction.
“Our head is bloody, but unbowed.”
Like a mantra, we would repeat to ourselves in the moments of deepest desperation. How do you recover when sh/v happens in the presence of those who also inflicted violence against us? How do you recover when sh/v happens in the presence of those who hold us with love? With fear for our lives? How do you disentangle shame and guilt from sh/v, when you know that you are desperately fighting ghostly tendrils of memories faded that became broken mirrors?
How do you recover when sh/v is an act of survival, an act of fight, an act of righteous indignation that rips vengeance from the dead bodies, the cold shards, like ice lining a heart stopped, unless it is shocked by the lightning strike of pain? Sometimes a closed fist is a hail mary, a left hook from desperation and rage.
How do you recover when you don’t have control over your own body? How do you recover when your body is actually just body parts, dismantled over time, put back together in different configurations, over and over? What full body story is the true one? How many variations can be graphed, before you cover the whole page with streaks of color?
Pain has a gradient, while layered violence becomes a muted exponential ride towards death, ripping our deathwish from its place. The space that sh/v holds is a beautiful mystery that stops the ride, actualizing the suffering of this timeline into something that can be alchemized. Self-harm and self-violence save us from killing this body, from killing us. The paradoxical rush of alchemy is recognizing that what is changed also changes you.
We alchemize our sh/v experiences, as they are, expressions rooted in the pain of this life.
Sometimes the sh/v expressed unknown pains, silenced into invisibility that only erupted as terror wailing against the wind. Sometimes the sh/v expressed in methodical precision, delicate carvings in patterns lines numbers that meant safety in the moment. It was like chasing a red wave that never ended, darting the horizon like a sunrise rising on our bodies. If our pain was the sunrise, then eventually it would set.
The sun always sets, from sunrise to sunset.
Sometimes the sh/v expressed like a bubbling vat, overflowing as witches step to the side of a magical spell, cast into the world of the sheer terror of experiencing the world in an unknown mind, wired to be autistic, multiple, Mad, psychotic, cosmic, and misfired miswired misfits unknown fits of rage because the pain of just living in this body is, was, will be too much.
Sometimes the sh/v was disciplinary actions, restricted body movements, like an embodied model of domination and submission because if we control us, then we could not be controlled.
If we controlled us, we believed, we could not be controlled.
It was a foolish attempt at the desperate drag towards autonomy and agency stolen from us. Sometimes the sh/v was the only way we could feel anything anymore, like a husk cast into the ocean sinking, weighted by despair. Sometimes the sh/v was accidental, a reckless consequence of those most disconnected to the full body form.
Sometimes the sh/v was transmuted pleasure, pushing the body past edges cast into the wind, winding down staircases in wells darker and deeper than ever dug through the fingernails on our skin. Past the horizon on sensory systems lay connections that confuse even the most courageous witches because how do you stay safe when pain is pleasure and pleasure becomes pain. Foolish to think there is a line drawn that separates pain and pleasure, when in fact they are sisters, linked in arms waiting in the wings.
“Our head is bloody, but unbowed.”
These moments in the darkness are only recovered in pieces, laced with arnica to ease the bruises, and ice for the swelling and Advil for the pain, and deep breaths for the shame. Sometimes it requires bandages and triage more nuanced for wound care, an act of refuge seeking solace in the same hands that harm. The drastic dichotomy of multiplicity is that the hands that help can also be frightening in the minds of us unknown, lost in terror and berating the skin-thick walls of this caged body. In the worst cases, there is a visit to emergency/urgent care, an incredibly unsafe environment for navigating sh/v care.
Harm reduction practices keep grace in our pockets, lined with compassion forged from fire and burns. Small white lines dot our skin, covered in inked remembrance that we were once here in the red hues of dawn, awaiting the sun set. I like to think that pain has always been a portal for us. A doorway to walk through, unbeknownst to us what lies ahead, with a push to drop down into the smallest of spaces.
Left with only a single match, we would light ourselves on fire. Pain was never the end point, because death was the mission. How and when we got to death depended on what blood painted the walls of our mind. Was it yours? Was it mine?
Self-harm and self-violence was just a detour, a small dip in the road from this point to the next, keeping us alive a few steps longer, living with a deathwish.
So, was this an essay on pain, or was it pleasure, or was it control, or self-inflicted injury stepping into the chaos of our own making. Was it the general weather or is this your storm that we found? There is another tornado on the horizon, best run for cover. We’re just trying to keep us safe.
As the darkness closes overhead, we remember
“Our head is bloody, but unbowed.”
if you or a beloved are navigating experiences around self-harm, this is an incredible resource for support 🖤