Cyber Launch Party Day 13: The Ballad of a Scar

Welcome to Day 13 of the Ballads of Suburbia Cyber Launch Party! For all of the details on the party including guests, the daily contests and the grand prize drawing be sure to read the information at the beginning of Day 1's blog.

Today's Winner:

Each day I am announcing the winner of the contest that was posted one week earlier. Today's winner gets Invisible Touch from Kelly Parra! And that winner is... Diana Dang from blogger! I will email you for your address shortly! Remember to enter last week's contests! Each contests lasts one week!

Today I thought I'd share another ballad. It is my blog and I can't help taking control every now and then. As I mentioned in my last blog about the origins of Ballads of Suburbia, this book deals with a lot of issues that affected me personally. I want to speak to some of them during this party. So today's ballad is...

The Ballad of a Scar: Stephanie Kuehnert

In Ballads of Suburbia, the characters introduce their ballads with song lyrics. While I definitely have some lyrics that suit the topic I'm about to write about ("Cut my skin, it makes me human/scorn your mind, just feel the pain/When you're looking at pain, you're looking at truth/Nothing like pain to make us all the same"- The Gits), this photo really sums up my battle with self-injury best. But I'll explain it later. This is called the Ballad of a Scar because I want to start with the first scar...

The first time I cut myself it was on accident. Sort of. It happened in seventh grade. I was upset about a combination of things. My best friend and I were fighting. And I had a crush on a boy. A really nerdy boy. I was ashamed of my crush. I couldn't tell anyone about it because I feared being made fun of for liking this guy. He wasn't traditionally cute. He was a mega-nerd. But really so was I. Yet, I knew I was supposed to be aiming higher. I should just remain friends with this boy. Only sorta kinda friends. Like I should make fun of him with my friends. Even though that made me feel terrible. And worse, the nerdy boy, was pursuing someone else. I was such a hideous loser not even this boy would like me. I was trying to aim higher than him and he was trying to aim higher than me. And did I mention my best friend was being a total bitch? She kept trying to one-up me in gymnastics until finally I decided I just didn't want to do gymnastics anymore, so I quit and focused my energy on stage crew instead. She was mad at me about that. She was always mad at me that year. Her grandma had cancer and she was taking all her emotions out on me, though I didn't get that at the time. All I got was that most everyone else in school was mean to me and now my supposed best friend was being mean too and I had this crush on this boy. Ugh. The angst of being 12.

So I was taking it out the sets we were dismantling and I accidently snagged the top of my left forearm on a nail. I cried out just a little bit and tears welled up. I got pissed like I still do to this day when I accidentally stub my toe or something. But being pissed felt good. The pain in my arm felt good. It felt like I'd opened up and released some of that pent up horribleness. So instead of going to tell the stage crew manager that I'd hurt myself like I was supposed to do, I glanced around to make sure no one was looking and I ripped my arm across the nail again. Then I sighed, satisfied.

Later I would freak out a little, worried that I might get tetnus or lockjaw or some terrible ailment you get when cutting yourself on rusty metal. But I didn't tell anyone because A. being hospitalized with some terrible ailment would help me to escape school for a few days and B. probably nothing would happen and if I told, people might somehow deduce that I liked cutting myself and it wasn't right to like cutting myself, but it provided a release in away that nothing else did and I wanted to do it again.

I wrote in my journal about that first cut and all my conflicted feelings about it. I even drew a picture of where it was on my arm, pleased with the fact that I would always have a scar to remind me of how I'd felt that day. Like I needed that as a badge of survival. That scar was tiny so it faded, though I could point out to you exactly where it was. I can almost still feel it, like the way my ankle that I've sprained too many times aches in the rain, a phantom ache.

I wish I had the entry to share, but I was so worried about my friends finding out about that secret crush, I threw the journal away. When I looked for it, in hopes that I was remembering wrong, that I'd actually kept that journal, I found my eighth grade journal, which was filled with references to early cutting and other self-abuse. "I got so upset, I cut twice on my wrist and once on my ankle." "In the library today, X and I scratched up our wrists with sandpaper." Instead of carving the initials of boys I liked in trees, I scratched them into my skin with a safety pin. Unrequited love hurt and I made myself feel it.

Sandpaper, scissors, safety pins those were the weapons of choice in eighth grade as I struggled with more bullying and the best friend moving away and a series of other friendships that fell apart.

By junior year of high school, I was carrying a razor blade in my wallet and burning myself with matches or cigarettes. I'd move from unrequited love to a series of relationships that were terrible for me. Boys that loved drugs more than me or had commitment issues (or both) and then that abusive relationship. I really lost all control after that. I carved SLUT into my upper arm. I slashed up my stomach and inner thighs. I put cigarettes out on my legs.

This brings us to the point when the photo was taken. A period when I tried (unsuccessfully) to stop cutting. One of my best friends snapped that pic of my arm toward the end of junior year when I was putting together a 'zine about working through the wreckage of the abuse. I scrawled that word in black Sharpie on my arm over my scars. In the zine I included a diagram of how my arm looked beneath the words:

I tried to be strong, I tried to be a survivor, but I kept ending up angry or sobbing or both in a puddle of my own blood. I hated what I was doing to myself, but at the same time I couldn't stop. I wouldn't until my early 20s.

A lot of you are probably wondering why? Why the hell would you do that to yourself? I tried to illustrate why fictionally in Ballads of Suburbia, but to get inside of Kara's head, I had to go back inside of my own. I looked through those old zines and diary entries and found these explanations:

"My scars tell my truest stories."

"Cutting and burning myself is a release of tension, I do it to let the inner pain out. It is unhealthy, but at the time (and sometimes still) it was hard for me to voice my depression or pain, mutilation was one of the few ways I could express emotion."

"And I scar this body to make it mine because I don't understand this smooth pale skin, I don't know who it belongs to, I have no identity, but I refuse to live my life that way. I am a stranger in a strange body so I make this body mine. I tear into it with my confusion, it is not clean smooth pale cuz I am not clean smooth pale, I am torn, I am covered with random red ridges from trying to open up my insides to let out the pictures and stories stolen lost lost sucked inside a blackhole and I try to set them free, desperate attempts scratch scratch, at least these memories are permanently etched into me. at least I adapt this body to make it something I can feel somewhat comfortable in, if I only knew what comfortable meant to me."

"I was taught to trust no one, no one wanted to hear about my feelings, self mutilation was the only thing that soothed them."

"I wrote out the tales in quick slashing motions, thinking if I did it fast enough maybe someone (me?) would understand. I carved stories into the outercasing of my soul, on the most sensitive part where no one would see, I told them for me, to try to understand."

"I wanted to tear myself to pieces to make me clean, make me me, start all over again."

"Self mutilation is my addiction and I don't know when or if I'll ever completely stop. It's something I've felt ashamed about for years, so many people act like I'm crazy, "how could you do that?" and then there are some people who seem to think one does it because it is cool or fun. It's not. It's painful (mentally), it makes me angry, and it makes me feel like shit. But my scars are not ugly, they are me, they are what makes this body mine, they tell a story, a story I can only seem to tell written in my own blood."

"I carve lines into my skin hoping that instead of bleeding, light will shine through my skin like a lantern and illuminate all the thoughts and feelings that I can't seem to put into words."

"Self mutilation is not suicide, it is not my pleading for death, but rather my way to stay alive inside by purging repressed and masked feelings somehow. I crawl and scratch my way back to life and maybe someday I won't have to bleed to express feeling. Just trust me on one thing, I will survive."

I did survive. And to do so, I had to learn how to turn those feelings into words. The more I focused on writing, the less I cut. Until finally I just didn't anymore. Strangely enough I don't remember the last cut. There were many times when I consciously told myself this will be the last time, but then I'd lose control. Eventually in my early twenties when I went back to school for writing and seriously went into the therapy, it just stopped.

Does the urge come back? Sure. Especially when I was writing Ballads and going down those dark roads. But I've learned to fight my way through the ugly emotions and come up with something positive. This blog entry, it's ugly, it was hard to write, but I hope that it will be something positive. I hope it will create a sense of hope for those that do injure themselves, motivate them to find their way of healthy expression. And I hope it will create a sense of understanding for everyone else. Because I don't hide my scars. Many of them are there, quite visible between the two tattoos on my left forearm. They are not badges of honor nor are they memories like I once thought they would be. They are simply a painful truth.

Today's Contest:
It feels slightly weird to ask for comments on this, so if you are too uncomfortable to say what you are thinking feel free to just ask to be entered in the contest.

Up for grabs today is a signed copy of Ballads of Suburbia and a copy of the last zine I did when I was 17 that dealt with some of these issues.

As usual, you'll earn additional entries by blogging/tweeting/etc about this blog or the cyber launch party. Just note your additional entries in your comment. Winner will be chosen at random on Wednesday, August 5th.

Tomorrow's Guest:

Tomorrow, Lauren Baratz-Logsted, author of Crazy Beautiful among other fabulous books will be guest-blogging. So please come back to see what she has to say!