Second Person

When Happiness Doesn't Work

If there was ever a reason for a trigger warning, it would be now. The whole point of most of these is to not censor the gore and reality of living this way, so if you can't handle or are easily taken back by things like self-harm, I wouldn't read on.

Anyway, the linked song is what the title is from and something i listen to on repeat for a while while writing this.

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You had a routine. You had a light. You had a purpose. You lost your routine and you slowly started to lose your light... you slowly started to use your purpose.

A walk. You had such a happy walk. And a smile, the most beautiful smile. You had such a beautiful thigh, such a beautiful hip. You had such a beautiful, beautiful brain. Now you have nothing.

You are a ghost. You walk through life as if you are a spectral being, drifting between classes and conversations. Between days and weeks. Drifting between broken thought to body wracking cries. Between muffled sobs and crescent shaped wounds in the palm of your hands. Fingers drifting between new, red lines to older, pale ones. You walk through life as if drifting through walls and people, being completely unseen.

Your smile was beautiful and now you use it for evil. It tugs at the corners of your mouth as you touch the cold steel of your blade. You run your fingers over the edge that was supposed to be sharp, left dull from misuse. You scratch dry blood off with your chewed, blunted fingernails, inexplicably wanting the razor to look as pure as possible.

Again, your smile tugs at your lips, this time as you trace the blade against one of the many scars on your thigh, one of the many scars on your hip. It is filled with mirth, although there is another emotion- relief. The smile doesnt leave your face, perhaps only intensifies. No, it stays on your face as you drag the blunted edge of the razor across your skin. The smile doesnt leave as you make a second trip, the skin starting to break under the extra pressure youre exerting. That damned smile doesn't leave, not even when blood finally starts to flow. The smile only leaves until minutes later, after you've bandaged your body and let what you've done sink in. The smile leaves only when you realize you've done something horrible.

It wasn't that you thought it was horrible, it was just horrible. What you thought didn't matter, your reasons didnt matter. Your thoughts on an important matter didnt matter because you don't matter. They don't matter because you're broken. No one wants anything that is broken. No one cares about something after it has been broken. You don't care about your opinion because it doesn't matter, not when it's a broken opinion.

You knew it wasn't all bad. You learned from it. Slowly you started to realize that there is a secret language among people like you. It was subtle, but it was undoubtedly there. You even started to notice that you too did it, at least when you weren't paying close attention to make sure you didn't let your faults slip through those tiny, almost invisible cracks. You didn't want them to realize you were like them. You were unbashfully ashamed.

Still, you watched them and you made sure to analyze every move they made. You watched their reactions to certain words and what made them the most uncomfortable. You saw the way that they moved their bodies, could tell when there was fresh harm and where the shame was showing through the microscopic seams of old scars. You saw the way they touched their own bodies when the idea of self-harm came up. Hands would move to wrists and thighs, jackets hugged around hips, the toes of shoes brought up to scratch uncomfortably at ankles. You could create a database of who had scars where, if you really wanted to.

No matter how hard you try, you know you catch yourself doing it too. When you just don't care, you know you rub your thighs, the main target of your self-hatred. You knew that when you are tired and you need to stay awake you would stuff your hands under your jacket and trace the scars on your hip (you didn't need to see where they are; you could map both of your hips without looking with perfect accuracy). You know that, when the urge arrives or relatively recently after a cut, you become irritable, you have a short fuse. You know you catch yourself scratching at your hands or wrists when something happens that you can't quite handle. You know that you aren't as inconspicuous as you think you are, you know you can't bring yourself to care.

A teacher of yours once asked you if adults were completely oblivious to kids in your situation (not that she knew it was your situation). You scoffed at that, knowing just how oblivious they were. You watched kids who teachers thought didn't have a thing wrong with them walk home only to turn the blade of a razor or the flame of a lighter on themselves. You could estimate how many people went home and seriously considered, actually contemplated, finally using the noose they learned how to tie, wondered if that drop would kill them, finally learned how deep that razor or knife needed to go before it would become unrepairable. Almost all of that went on without a teacher or adult ever knowing it happened until it was too late. Yeah, you thought, adults were pretty oblivious.

They might as well have been. What would they do to help you? They wouldn't understand, there are rarely adults that do truly understand. When you do occasionally find those people, they always get taken away anyway. Adults couldn't do anything, not really, and you were content with that. It was your battle, not theirs, you would need to handle yourself anyway. Learn how to handle the fluctuating moods, going from sad to happy to in between in no time at all. You needed to understand yourself, understand how to control yourself.

One day it clicked. Things seemed brighter to you, things almost seemed happier. The dull blade and the jagged scars, they didn't matter as much to you anymore (it's all in the past tense). Smiles became real smiles, your beautiful smiles returned (this too will pass). Your walk regained its beauty and maybe, just maybe, you saw something beautiful in those scars... something that made you feel at peace (it won't last, it can't). Your brain, it felt better, you felt brilliant (did you? Or were you just fooling yourself?). You felt like you could take on that math homework, you felt like you could finally do what you were good at (but you couldn't... or course you couldn't). You felt alive (but of course you weren't, you had no right to be).

And it stopped. Whatever semblance of a light there was, it had gone... it was gone. How silly of you for thinking you could escape your prison. How silly of you to think that just because it is broken, just because you are broken, that your brain would be easy to escape. A broken system is the hardest to crack, after all (there was no escape). You would just have to try harder (was there even actually a light?). You had to get to the light (you were sure you liked the dark more). Eventually you would get over all of it (one way or another). You would get better (no you wouldn't).