TW: Mentions of self-harm and suicide.
I celebrate April 21st. I have for the last twelve years. I call it an unofficial self-care day. Or sometimes a celebration of
This all started back in 2007. I was fourteen, self-harming, and suicidal. It had been going on for a while and without rehashing, I was coming to a breaking point. It felt, at the time, that if I took one step forward I would kill myself. On April 21st, a Saturday that year, I was very close to taking that step.
Luckily, the scene played out another way. For a while afterward, I called it God, but whatever was building and blurring inside of me suddenly crystalized: this was enough. I was done. My future self thanks that moment. Making decisions for the rest of your life at fourteen is crazy. But when you’re fourteen you don’t know that.
I stopped hurting myself and started reaching out to people I loved for help. I counted the days I didn’t pick up a knife until it had been a year. April 21st. My mom gave me a card. I wore a dress to school.
Every year after I’ve marked it: dressing up or making puppy chow or doing something special.
I hit nearly seven years before I relapsed self-harming in college and I thought I’d destroyed April 21st together. Wasn’t that what this day meant? Not hurting myself. How could it mean anything after I’d broken that promise? And yeah, that seven year date was tough.
But we have control over how we give and strip power. That day saved my life and for nearly seven years it kept cuts off my skin. It was the first time in my life I’d decided consciously that I wanted to live my life. The second and third times I decided the same thing, as an adult, were only possible because of that little girl who stood in her empty house and screamed her lungs out. I love that little girl.
And she didn’t know it at the time, but she loved me. She gifted me every day ahead of that moment. Now I try to do the same for the woman in my future: who I’ll be tomorrow and days and years after. I have to take it on faith, in the tough moments, that she’ll thank me for pushing onwards.
So I kept April 21st after my relapse. And after my second relapse. I am more careful what power I give dates now. I haven’t hurt myself in years, but I couldn’t tell you the last time. I didn’t want more promises and grief tied up in calendar days. I carry enough of those without trying.
I try to use today as a reminder to take care of myself and to remind others to do the same. Self-care may be selfish, but you deserve to be selfish when it comes to your wellness and joy. You are deserving not on your merit or goodness or sacrifice, but by just being.
I told my mom the other day that April 21st was on Sunday. On Easter this year.
“That’s ironic,” she said. And I didn’t get it for a moment.
Easter. Resurrection. Rebirth. Pretty on the nose. I started laughing. “I forgot about Jesus!” I told her.
But, yeah, I’ll run with the metaphor. I believe in starting over. I believe in rising. I believe in having faith. In a higher power or in myself.
With Love,
Natalie