|
I put up a trigger icon just to be safe...
(and I'm a tad sleep-deprived right now—been busy this week—so I'm going to ramble on a bit :P)
But yeah, from a philosophical standpoint, is pain really that terrible? I mean, we as self-injurers are used to pain, or at least, used to inflicting pain upon ourselves. We experience something that too few people do; we may find enjoyment from pain. And perhaps it IS rooted in deep-seated issues resulting in some guilt-driven need for self-punishment, or a way to cope with life's troubles, or something of the like, but (and here's where I may get a tad random...) what is life about really? The human experience? It's not just about feeling happy all the time; it involves taking in the sad, as well. The dark and the light. The good and the bad. The pleasure and the pain. Life's a balance, right?
The good times are beautiful. We all love when good happens. Good times can make us feel ALIVE. But at the same time, pain (both physical and metaphorical) can be good as well. I mean, not only does it serve its purpose of reopening our eyes to the good, of reawakening our appreciation for the good times when we so often take them for granted, but pain ITSELF... it can be beautiful too. In its own sort of way. The act of cutting open flesh, of watching your life force flow out of you, to bring a match to your skin, burn off skin, to feel a sensation most people are afraid of feeling... it can be empowering.
I know myself, back when I was not even thinking about stopping my cutting (I haven't since february), when I would hear people whine about things, especially about petty things, things as little as a papercut they may have received during the day, I would be inwardly smirking. These people whined about their pain, while I just controlled mine. I dished out my OWN pain, and I could handle it. I felt stronger because of it.
Maybe self injury is a bad thing. Or maybe it's just the motivations behind it that are bad. What if I were to make a new cut on my skin, for no reason other than I was bored or simply felt like it? What if I just like the sensation of pain itself? What if I cut into myself simply for the sake of experience, because I wanted to live “on the edge”, so to speak? Bungie jumping, white water rafting, sky diving, bull riding, motorcross, extreme snowboarding, racing, boxing, etc... all of these “on the edge” activities really aren't in any way any safer than self-injury, yet they're perfectly socially acceptable activities. We're coaxed by so-called safety measures into believing that they're safe (some of them, anyway), but really, they're not. Not even remotely close. A number of things could happen that could result in, should the worse happen, death. And people freak out with a few cuts on the skin?
Maybe the sleep deprivation has incited this rant; maybe it's just an elaborate justification of my past actions, or maybe this is just a rationalization of any possible self-injury I might inflict in the future... either way, I still feel like—always have, in fact—that SI is not always as bad as everyone makes it out to be. At the least, pain itself isn't.
Apologies for the rant. Hope I didn't bore everyone to death. :P
|