Stories About CuttingI Cut When The Pain Gets To Be Too Much
Nathalie calls her self a "cutter." She is 15 years old. She doesn't have many friends in real life. Her best friends are from the Internet. On the Internet she can be totally honest. She can talk about why she cuts herself and why she doesn't eat.
She has never had a boyfriend and she can not remember the last time anyone hugged her or told her they loved her. She lives with her grandparents because her step-father and mother didn't want her to live with them anymore. She gets one hour three times a week on the Internet. If she goes one minute over, she loses it for two weeks. She said she can't talk to her grandparents. She said they come from another era.
Nathalie told me she cuts when the pain gets to be too much. She has 23 scars. When she was 10 she would sit in the class and stare out the window. When the teacher would call out her name and tell her to stop looking out the window and pay attention it would frighten and embarrass her. She said the other children in the class would laugh at her. They called her the Nathalie the daydreamer. Sometimes she would get punished for not knowing the answers to the teacher's questions. She said once she had to write "I will not stare out the window" 500 times.
I asked her what she would think about when she was staring out the window. She said she was usually trying to figure out why she was such a horrible person. I asked her why she thought of herself as a horrible person. She said, "I thought I must be horrible if my mother doesn't want me to live with her and my father never wanted to see me." I asked her if her mother had hit her. She said, "Yes. Sometimes." I asked her if she thought that her mother was abusive. She said, "No, I wouldn't say that. She only hit me when I made her angry. So I guess I deserved it."
Then I asked her why she thought her father never wanted to see her. She said, "I really don't know. Isn't it normal for a father to want to see his own daughter? What could I have done to make him hate me so much?" She said he moved away when she was 6. She said she has written him letters but he has never written back. She said she lays awake at night wondering if he ever reads the letters or if he even gets them. She said he must get them because they never get returned to me by the post office.
I asked her if she ever told anyone that her mother was hitting her. She said once she did but then they talked to her mother and the mother said Nathalie was a "compulsive liar." They believed her mother over Nathalie, so Nathalie was afraid to ever tell anyone else again. When we talked about her feelings she always said she learned that people didn't want to hear her true feelings. So she kept themself. When they got too much for her, she would reach for her razor.
