[Eyeliner]

I first self-harmed when I was 11 years old. I can remember the occasion well. To be honest, I don’t think I would have thought to self-harm had I not have seen it on television. Around the time I first cut myself I remember there was a storyline on a popular TV programme about a teenage girl who self-harmed, by cutting her wrists. I think that is where I got the idea from.  I must have thought that, somehow, cutting myself would make me feel better. The first time I cut, I cut across my wrist using a pair of nail scissors, and the cut was more of a scratch. I cannot remember whether or not it made me feel better, I just remember being really secretive about what I had done. Looking back, and having a much deeper understanding of self-harm, I would say it was my way of screaming out about how I was feeling. I think I just wanted somebody to ask me "Are you OK?", but nobody did. I wasn’t OK, but I saw no other way to express how distressed I was feeling inside. Nobody ever knew that I self-harmed until 4 years later.

It is hard to believe that 10 years ago I was simply marking my body with a scratch, a scratch so small it would be gone after a matter of days, and nobody would ever know it had been there, when I think about the damage I have caused to my body over the last 9 months.

That is the sad reality; your self-harm will get worse if you don’t try to fight it. For so long I tried to fight my problem with self-harm alone, and not burden anybody else with my problems, but you don’t have to do that. Whilst it is down to you to make a firm choice to stop self-harming there will be many people who want to help you along the way.