by Max (@piercethemax_)

Personal Story

"Life gives you enough scars,

You don't need to manufacture your own."

-Andy Biersack

On Saturday, 21 September 2015, a regular, sunny Saturday on the beautiful coastline with a glittering sun peeking through my bedroom window, I planned every peck of detail of the methods I was going to use to remove myself from this world. I wrote my suicide note, I had the correct amount of pills, I had my razors, I was ready to end it all that very night.

But I never did.

I was torn between life and death, I believed every single reason on earth for my existence was disintegrating beneath the tips of my fingers, that I didn't have a meaning in society.

What I've done to myself, to others, the hurt, the pain; I didn't take the negative energy and process it correctly, which inevitably left me dealing with a great amount of scars over my body and mind, embarrassed that people would ask me why and who or even leave me, because I have these scabs and scars scattered over my entire body since I was thirteen. I thought it was okay to hurt myself because I was hurt by so many outsiders.

My journey wasn't short lived, but to this very day I have an internal battle with myself to leave the razor alone and rather do something productive with myself — like writing stories.

So, why am I actually telling people my lethargic timeline between my adolescent years?

I didn't plan on writing a personal article for The Safe Zone Magazine, I figured I wanted to write an article because I like writing and the previous one I wrote for this movement was quite eccentric and I'd love to do it again. Did I bargain to rant about my own personal experience with a topic so dear to me, such a secret to me, that not even my mother knew of it after two years? I did, in fact, not. I didn't actually want to write it either, I don't like talking about myself, so why did I decide against it and wrote it?

My self-mutilation journey didn't start when I started feeling what felt like pangs of depression, it started, and much to my dismay when I made fun of it. To this day, I hate myself for making fun of self-mutilation, because I didn't think it'll become such a fragile topic for me.

My friends were making fun of self-mutilation. I didn't think too much of it at that time, but then my life took a turn out of the eye of the storm and set me inside the hurricane. I thought I was falling apart, people around me were dying, leaving, hurting me — so what conclusion did I come to, to subside the pain?

I resorted in pain.

To kill the pain with pain sounded so easy, it was so easy — just disassembling the closest pencil sharpener. I found myself a way to cope, but it didn't do any good.

Firstly, self-mutilation looks downright ugly. I did it all to cover up the scabs on my wrist — I wore sweaters in the middle of summer, I wore so many bracelets my arms were heavier than my shoes sometimes, I used concealer and foundations and every other makeup supply. It didn't work. I never liked going to the beach, because beaches meant bikinis, and there weren't only scabs on my arms, but my thighs, so I deliberately tried to hide from the thing that made me happy.

Secondly, it took what felt like a million years to heal, so I wore sweaters and long sleeves the entire summer, most of the time. My friends thought I had some kind of heat regulating problem; they probably thought I went completely bonkers, but they didn't ask.

After it became a temporary coping mechanism, I was completely hooked. I cut a lot of people out of my life, I started fights if people mocked self-mutilation. I became the monster I was hiding.

After struggling with myself a couple of years, I came home one day, crying and death felt like the only solution.

That's when I knew I was too far in this to get out of it alone.

I'm not telling this story to trigger anyone who suffers, but to tell them that they're going to be okay.

Everything will be okay, I promise because it turned around for me.

I showed my mom two wrists full of large scabs and like I expected — she completely freaked. She broke down, took all sharp objects I could get my hands on, interrogated me, searched my room as if I hid explosives. It took her a while to calm down, she checked up on me, disallowing me to sit in my room alone. I was dragged to the shops, but at that point, I didn't really care, because naïvely, I was planning my suicide.

Soon, my mother started forgetting and the cycle I once left, was dominant over my existence again; I fell, again. I knew something wasn't quite right with myself, I knew it wasn't normal to yearn to die, so I wrote my parents an entire essay just to explain that I want to die, but I don't want to kill myself.

Like any other paranoid set of parents, they sent me off to a psychologist and with that, I created an account on Wattpad. I put fury into syllables, sadness into sentences. My entire existence started revolving around this one particular story I dearly love; the story that helped me wake up and realize: I'm not in this alone.

Not only are you the only one struggling with the demons in your head, but there are people who know how you feel. People whom lived through your stage of life. People whom survived.

I know it's hard, addiction, it's a nostalgic remedy, but it's only temporary.

Once a cut is made, blood oozes from the wound. It doesn't take long until the blood sets and your cells take part in mitosis to heal. Once the cells divided, the scab will flake, leaving new, shiny cells. You shouldn't think of scars as your disgusting proof of your mind, or as your battle scars, but as your bookmarks. It keeps track of the day you despised yourself, but you didn't kill yourself because you are worth so much more than it. Scabs are a token of strength, although very romanticized in our era.

The idea clicked in my head the day my mother, the one person usually minoring me, said, "please tell me you don't want to commit suicide anymore? I can't deal with the idea of finding your blood-soaked body on the floor or calling your grandfather and telling him his granddaughter's funeral is next week. It'll hurt too much."

Something inside me clicked. It just exploded — how will my family react to my death? How many people will miss me? How many people will fake the "friendship" we had and cry, because we were "friends". How many people will care for me after my death? How will life be after death for me?

What legacy will I leave if I had to die right now?

You are an open wound: you need time to heal. When you heal, you'll be renewed. You will change lives, there's no hesitation.

I wrote this article with procrastination and hatred, fighting not to cut open old wounds, but I had to let others know, let myself know, that life is pretty much okay. That life is not out to get me. This was my next step to healing and I was ready to get better.

I'm still recovering, so instead of just blatant ranting, I figured to put together ten tips on what to do when you feel sad or triggered:

1) Eat. Just eat, go to the kitchen and disembowel the entire fridge or raid the sweets cabinet.

2) Jam to your favorite song [I head-bang to Troye Sivan].

3) Pet a dog or a cat, or play with them.

4) Draw something on a blank page or write a poem and tear it up into flakes of white paper snow. You'll hurt your illustration and words instead of your body, and it'll be a lot better to get your agitation out.

5) Write a journal of your feelings. If you're done writing how you feel, you'll be relieved of your bottled up emotions and you'll rarely want to harm yourself after it. Sadness and anger usually last for only twenty minutes.

6) Binge watch your favorite TV show or watch a movie — it'll take your mind off things.

7) Go for a run, not only will it make you feel better, but your mind will wander off your faults onto other things.

8) Go to bed earlier, minds tend to wander after hours. Sleep over scabs any day.

9) Read your favorite book. It'll take your mind off things.

10) Get out of your room, go catch some fresh air, participate in a hobby. You just need to get your mind out of the gutter and doing something you love and it'll make you forget.

The start of the article — 21 September 2015 — was one of my most powerful relapses, which is another reality. Relapsing is normal, sometimes it gets difficult to handle recovery, but you have to show your strength. To this day, I still relapse, but very little and very powerful. Relapses show your strength if you can handle being back in the bad place you were in once.

There is living proof that it gets better, I promise you. As cliché as it is, life is a roller coaster. You've got to build up to a climax before everything just crumbles back down, but it's only to gain momentum so you can speed forward into a sky full of dreams.

I'm Max and I'm 16 days clean after relapsing after about six months and I wrote my last suicide note on 16/06/09.

I'm progressing, and so should you.