By my senior year of high school, I was about a year into the eating disorder recovery process and had finally reached a stable place with my weight and food intake. By all medical measures, I had recovered, or at least reached the right number on the scale. Still, something had been lost amid the force feeding and the constant weigh-ins. I had sacrificed a part of my soul. I lost it somewhere in the cold, sterile waiting rooms, under the fluorescent interrogation lights while waiting for the verdict from my doctor, possibly sucked up through needles during the blood draws to check my nutrient levels.
Am I still sick? The answer, written somewhere on her clipboard in official red pen, was Nope. The scale said “All good,” and the thousands of dollars in doctors’ bills said “It’s time to get over whatever this is.” My mother was proud: “I’m sure you’re the best patient they’ve ever had.” Apparently, I am as good at recovery as I am at killing myself (I can get pretty damn close to both).
But despite all the surveillance of intensive outpatient care, there was still the voice taking refuge deep inside me, saying, “They didn’t really see you, how every morsel of food feels like a personal failure. They don’t know the sound of the voice in your head, screaming your inadequacy and drowning out every waking thought.” I had just mastered eating oatmeal without gagging, a feat that would have been monumental for a toddler but is pitiful for a teenager. Just a few days earlier, my best friend had gone to the emergency room because she was choking on her own blood from forcing herself to throw up so violently. She was choking on blood, and I was choking on the monotony that had taken over my life in the absence of physical pain. I was a machine eating my meals at the right time, saying the things I was supposed to (“I love eating ice cream again!” “I am starting to like my body!”), but there was something sinister lurking beneath my skin, waiting to be released.
One day that December, I got rejected from my dream college. With the future I had constructed for myself slipping through my fingertips, I got an urge to do something I only knew about from videos so graphic they solely existed on the dark, seedy underbelly of Twitter. You had to be looking for them, these underground online communities of girls teaching self-harm as a road to some sort of salvation, or at least an alternative to succumbing to the surveillance of others.
That day, I put on some Phoebe Bridgers, my drug of choice at eighteen years old, grabbed a cheap plastic eyebrow razor, and carefully drew four lines of blood on each side of my upper thigh. I made it a whole production: The delicate tears in my eyes, the way the blood slowly pooled in the wake of the blade, the sweet, sad voice of Phoebe confirming the tone of the moment. I was the lead actor, director, and sole audience member in an indie film of my own beautiful wretchedness. What started as a sort of punishment for my academic failure, or maybe an attempt to communicate how lost and alone I felt, morphed into something unexpectedly sensual. In these last few years of other people (doctors, parents, coaches) telling me how my body was supposed to feel, I had become divorced from sensation. The undeniable, palpable slide of the razor slicing through my skin shattered the apathetic relationship I had developed with my body, sending an electric thrill down my spine. There was something satisfying about the ritual of it: the sharp pain followed by a euphoric tingling coursing through my bloodstream, and of course, the aftercare of gently pressing paper towels to my skin as I waited for the wounds to scab over. I had lived like I was dead for months, but this shameful act of painful pleasure I performed when the rest of my family was asleep made me feel alive. It was a paradox.
Or was it? During a digital era where adolescents are exposed to pornography on the internet by the age of eight and sex is not only something that happens in person with all five senses but also over FaceTime and text and Snapchat, “sex” and intimacy have become separate entities. Add to this asynchronous world young girls who are already socialized to disconnect from their bodies and desires (sexual, food, or otherwise) and trained to develop competitive relationships with each other. We crave intimacy, by which I mean the vulnerability of being naked in front of another person and asking them to make you feel good but also the thrill of exchanging secrets in the dark at a sleepover with your best friend, or the security of a mother’s hug after sharing all the inconsequential details of your bad day. These few real and reciprocal connections that can recenter girls in their bodies are waning, replaced by ten-minute ab workouts advertising a six-pack in seventy-two hours and Tinder messages from strangers fifty-plus miles away, asking for pictures of your body in exchange for the praise you are so desperate for.
If putting razor to flesh connected me with my body, it also connected me and my body to others in a perverse seduction. Whether it is the emaciated body or the white scars decorating someone’s upper arm, part of the thrill of the game is wondering if someone is going to notice these visual clues and solve the mystery. It mirrors the shame of getting fingered under the table, or attraction so overwhelming that you fumble to the nearest closet to get your hands on each other. The possibility of getting caught in your fit of passion is an addictive type of adrenaline. Admitting to this voyeuristic desire may be vulgar (in the sense of making public bodily functions typically kept private), but so is self-harm. It’s a hunger so deep it can only be paid for in blood. It’s the peep show consisting of a sleeve just short enough to flash evidence of what you did the night before. It’s a need so primal that there is a complete disregard for safety or health. A little bit of death, and where I and many other girls I know went to escape the way our sexuality was stolen from us.
Girls are shamed for pleasuring themselves. If they are brave enough to face the risk of becoming the class slut by having sex, they learn to put on performances for their partner’s pleasure. They are only allowed to be sexual for others, on the glossy pages of magazines, or OnlyFans, or with their mouths around the dicks of boys who’ve deemed them worthy of this sucking. Self-harm offers an avenue to reclaim their bodies, or maybe to receive the tender attention and intimacy they crave without a sign that reads whore on their backs.
Their sadness is tedious, their anger is unwarranted, and their pain unreadable— so girls search for ways to make their deepest feelings legible.
Girls learn that their sadness is tedious, their anger is unwarranted, and their pain unreadable, so they search for ways to make their deepest feelings legible, or at least meaningful, to resist being disappeared. Bella from Twilight gives up her life to be with her vampire boyfriend. Hermione from Harry Potter willingly rids her parents of any memory of her, erasing herself for “the greater good.” We learn that we become heroes in death and invisibility and sacrifice. We seek love and safety in sex and relationships and are met instead with devastating critiques of our bodies and a complete disregard for our pleasure. But in our pain, we become the revered figures we read about in books. Juliet poisoning herself to be with her one true love. Ophelia drowning in a pool of flowers. We are most beautiful and deserving of help when we are closest to death.
I sometimes try to remember if my self-harm in high school was an attempt to get someone to notice my pain, or was it that I was tangled in a melancholy so profound, it defied the attention-seeking nature of cutting yourself? But of course, I did not try to hide the bloody paper towels from the trash can I knew my father emptied. I left the rusty eyebrow razor I stole from my mother out on the bathroom counter more than a few times. I wore shorts that were short enough to reveal the fresh tracks on my thighs to track practice. I was Rose standing on the bow of the boat, waiting for Jack to notice and pull me to safety. In the end, like most girls, I had to haul myself back over the rail and save myself.
Audre Lorde famously defined what she called the erotic as “an assertion of the lifeforce of women,” a primal source of intelligence rooted deep within our bodies but actively warped by the pervasive oppression of patriarchy. When the life-giving force is so suppressed, it is not so surprising that girls try to access their power via its opposite—the death force. We may act like it is shocking that girls find power and pleasure in denying themselves food and cutting their skin, but we have blocked off other airways. Is it not more shocking to see girls are resilient and adaptable enough that they have found ways to make the pain they are told to keep locked up in their diaries readable on skin? Think of the raised scars on their upper arms and the sharply visible ridges of their spines as flags that read SOS.
Those willing to witness and listen instead of judge or diagnose will find that these wounds are not evidence of masochistic daydreams but rather desperate pleas for some mercy.
Until girls’ pleasure and power are nurtured and self-sacrifice is not the only path to receiving love and care, girls will continue to find ways to make their reality known.
The marks on our bodies are signs to our allies on the battlefield, letting our peers see that we are ready to surrender to each other.
We are trying to write our pain in the same language our bodies are read: skin deep.