Marked by Anger

When I was younger, I started doing something I never thought I would do. I'd heard so many stories, and seen so many scars from people who cut themselves to relieve their pain. And at some point, I thought it could help me too. I have always had a bad relationship with my mother. I always felt neglected, and un-loved. And after a while, I realized I was angry at her. I wanted to make her suffer. And as I thought then, the best way to do it, was to hurt myself.
I never really intended to hurt myself severely. And I was lucky, I never really did. It started about a week after I saw a friend who had cut herself on the arm with pieces of a broken plate. Everybody told her to stop but all she said was that it helped her deal with her depression. To be honest, I thought she was pathetic. "Your pain won't go away if you hurt yourself", I said. But it apparently helped her. After that I started thinking about it, more and more.
I wasn't depressed. I wasn't sad. I wasn't even really unhappy. But there was always this seething feeling deep inside of me, that never could find away to come out. I realized it was anger. I was angry. Not the normal teen-rebel anger that a lot of people have against the parents. My mother wasn't mean. I could do most things other kids weren't allowed to. Stay out late, get piercings, and stuff like that. So basically, I took care of myself. And since I hadn't seen my father in over five years, he was no one to turn to.
So one day, I was sitting in my room. I just had a fight with my mom, and I was so angry that I cried. And I hadn't cried for two years. So I got out this pocketknife. But, stupidly enough, I didn't use the knife, which would have been bad too, but what I did was worse. I used some sort of corkscrew, that was broken. So there was only this sharp edge left. I sat there and looked at it for a while. Then I put it against the skin of my arm, and with a swift movement I scratched my skin. The scar was very thin, and almost didn't bleed at all. But it was this beautiful, thin, crimson line... and I suddenly wanted more. I think I did about 7 or 10 of these, and then I suddenly felt pleased. I wasn't angry anymore. So I cleaned up the small wounds, and put a bandage over them. I didn't say anything, and nobody asked.
I did this for a couple of weeks. Every time I got angry, I scratched these small lines into my skin. Always the same place, the inside of my left underarm. The wounds turned to thin scabs, and as soon as they did, I scratched new ones.
But one day, something happened that made me swear to myself that I would never do it again. I never really pushed the edge into my skin. The cuts were always shallow. But this time, I wanted more blood. So I pushed, and quickly pulled it over my skin. It took my a while to realize what had happened. I looked at my arm, and there was a quite deep scar, maybe 4-5 millimeters, and it started to bleed a lot. I could even see some kind of yellow tissue under the blood. I panicked. I ran into the bathroom, pushed paper against it, got band-aids and a bandage. My mother and my oldest brother looked strangely at me when I ran in and out of the kitchen, but as always, didn't ask. So I rinsed the wound with cold water, and held my arm high. I dabbed it with some antiseptic stuff, too. I was strange, when I did the cut, I couldn't feel a thing. But now it was stinging like hell. So after about thirty minutes the bleeding stopped a bit. Or at least enough for me to be able to push the edges of the wound together, and use surgical-tape to cover it.
The weeks after that I was really uptight about my arm. I never put a lot of weight on it, and slept with a pillow underneath it so that it would be in a high position. After about three or four weeks I took the tape off the wound. I looked nice, there was only a really small section that wasn't healed up. So I cleaned it again, put a fresh band-aid on, and waited again. After two/three weeks, it was completely healed. It was now a brightly pink scar, and it stood up quite much. But now, about a year and a half later, it's actually white. So that's what I'm left with. I'm literally marked by my anger. A big white scar, and several (now almost invisible) thin scars. I don't cut myself anymore. I never dared to show my mother my wounds anyway, so it really didn't matter to me. Actually, even to this day, nobody knows. I haven't told anybody personally, but a couple of people know I've done it.

note: This is a fake,made up story to help kids deal with anger in a positive way instead of the path taken by the main character.

John P