For me, the cutting started when I was fourteen years old. I was very unhappy in high school, where I just did not fit in with the hipppie mein of the period, with my drab, dark clothes, no make-up and sad, downcast eyes. I was the kid everyone liked to pick on. Not only that, but my best friend, the only buddy I had since leaving our home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was moving back to the small resort town of Belle River. Needlness to say, the thought of being alone with the sharks in the pond, so to speak, was unbearable.

When I returned from a two-week idyllic visit to Belle River, where Cathy and her family lived right on the shores of Lake St. Claire. We had a wonderful time, and the best part was playing board games with the whole family every evening aftet supper. My family had never done that since we moved to London, Ontario and I sorely misssed it. When I returned home to my own somewhat dysfunctional family, i felt a tremendous sense of loss and despair. I cried pitifully, causing my frazzled father to leave the room (he wasn't big on emotional scenes) and Mom wondering whatever could she do do help me. I just said we were not a close family anymore and it was tearing me apart.

Later, after everyone including my brother, Jim, had gone to bed, I found one of Dad's razor blades, sneaked into the bathroom and sliced my left wrist open. The release was like a heady rush one gets when injesting cocaine: It immediately eradidated the emotional agony and the blood, as it poured symbolically down the drain, seemed to represent all that pain, depression and helplessness. I felt liberated, at least for a little while. But, unfortunatly, the exhileration did not last.

So my cutting became a habit and I was addicted. Now, twenty-seven years later, I am literally meshed with scar tissue, from my throat to my ankles. I have had over nine hundred stitches put in and I am an ugly sight to behold. Never again may I wear short sleeves, shorts, hslter tops or bathing suits in public, or else be the source of much horrified or morbidly fascinated staring. I just have to live with it.

I already mentioned a support group called S.A.F.E. It is comparable to Alcoholics Anoymous in that we have to admit that we are addicted to cutting and have to support one another. It is a valuable resource, but I have let things slide and haven't attemded a meeting since 1993. It is time to get re-connected and lose this terrible obsession before i accidentally hit a major artery and bleed to death alone somewhere.

If any of you reading this are cutters, or self-abuse in any way, please take comfort in the reality that there IS HOPE and that you do not have to spend years and years slicing and dicing yourself up like a carrot or a head of lettuce. We are not vegetabes---we are real, hurting human beings who have adoped an unhealthy way of temporarily ridding ourselves of emotional pain and despair.

I hope you are safe today or tonight, whenever you are reading this. Please, please do not pick up that blade. Throw the whole mess of them away and don't have tempting objects in your home. There is a way out----it is not an easy one, but it IS possible. I am certainly going to try before I have no undamaged skin left on my entire hody.

Please take good care of yourselves. You matter.