TW: Discussion of depression and self-harm.
For a spell today I got caught looking through some old emails. It started as archiving dated items and led to me surfacing emails I hadn’t looked at in a long while. One was a link to a compilation of film footage from my wedding week. Another was sending my senior BFA project to a friend. Of course, I watched the video. And then I reread my thesis for the first time in years.
My thesis is a non-fiction collection of vignettes telling the story of my depression, suicidal ideation, and self-harm when I was fourteen. Titled (somewhat melodramatically) “Bandages”. I wrote it seven years after it happened, as a senior in college, to try to make sense of the experience. As I was writing the thesis I was dealing with a relapse of depression and eventually self-harm that shocked me. I had thought I had lived that story of my life start to finish. To reenter that headspace as an adult tangled with the meaning I was searching for from the so-called epiphanies I’d found as a teenager.
Over five years since I’ve written the thesis, my fourteen-year-old self is even more distant. I read my memories from that time and recognize myself in them, but they no longer feel like myself. A blessing of time. I have other wounds to heal – I can’t continue to scratch open the ones from over a decade ago.
My BFA project is by far the longest documentation of my life, but it is a sliver of thousands of writings. I diary in the form of poetry. Each word like a snapshot of my heart. I rarely go and edit poems after they are first written for this reason – how can you edit a diary?
Some poems I reread and cry, feeling as angry or lost as I did when I wrote them. Some poems I reread and want to hold out my hand to that girl … but I am no longer her. Like I am no longer fourteen and scared of what I’ll do when left alone with safety scissors.
I once read an interview with Taylor Swift where she spoke about the idea of rebelling against the idea of yourself:
“I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this.”
I am who I have always been. With phases and choices and lessons I’m in the middle of learning. I can read a poem and love the girl who was in tears while writing. I can read my thesis and love the girl who wrote the last line “I can’t forget it.” I can love the girl who didn’t think there would ever be a day when she didn’t remember the cuts on her wrist.
I can love the girl today who, most days, forgets they are there at all.
It gives me hope. Life is not only trauma and healing. Even the memories that used to burn me don’t hurt to look at now. My therapist once said to me, about my divorce, that someday I’ll get to the point where it was just something that happened. Not fresh and acidic in my thoughts. I admit I didn’t believe her.
I didn’t think I would ever have days where I didn’t think about him. His memory as stark as the scars on my wrists.
But I can love the girl I’m becoming who, more days now, does not think about him at all.
With Love,
Natalie