I've never been much for formalities. Job interviews? I'd show up in my pajamas if I had the chance. I feel as though it never gives a person to see the real you if you have to dress up and act as though you're the best thing since sliced cheese, or bread, or whatever.
If my employer had the chance to see the real me, they would know what they were getting into.


Suicide has been at the forefront of my mind since sophomore year of high school. The amount of pain and shit I've been through has always lead me to believe that was the only way out. I've always been a sensitive soul. Yeah, okay, right? Everyone says that. But I mean, I literally feel the pain of others. I gladly make their pain mine, as well. Dealing with the problems of others has been easier than dealing with mine. It's something I can help fix, but I can't fix me. I'll always have the scars of cuts gone wrong and the sympathy of others that I'm not looking for.
And that's why I'm writing this.
I want to help.
Social anxiety, OCD, and severe depression.
No big deal, right? Everyone has those days where they're afraid to venture out into the open, or have things that have to be JUST right. ...Right?
No.
That's glorified bullshit.
Mental problems have become something that society has forced upon everyone.
You cut? Awesome. But you can stop anytime that you want and get better, even cooler.
But real mental disorders don't work that way.
I started self harming my sophomore year of high school, and I was a pro at it. No one knew until recently.
I would bite myself, punch my legs until they were numb, rip out my hair, and do other self damaging things that could be written off. Who the fuck cares about just a few bruises and a bald spot. I could write it off in some way. Usually that I was just a klutz and had no idea where they came from, and that was the end of that conversation.
But starving myself because I was too afraid to go into the cafeteria of my high school, walking down the halls with my teeth clenched so hard that I would chip pieces off, and getting to my classes early so I could straighten the desks wore on a body quickly and efficiently. I had no release for the extra stress I had, other than to do these things, and that lead to more stress, which lead to another outlet.
Self harm.
After the biting, bruising and such, I would take a safety pin or a tack, and I would gently carve away my skin, so there was nothing there but a small spot, Just enough to bleed. That's all I wanted, was to bleed. To know that I could, and to know that pain was real. Without doing something like that, I would think that all the pain I have ever been in was all mental. that I was just a hypochondriac waiting for my time in the sun. When I bled, I knew that pain was real, and that it wasn't just inside of me. 
I fell in love after that, but I didn't know what kind of love it was.
it was the best friend kind of love, to be honest, but I didn't know how to express it in any other way than physically, because I had never been that far in with someone before.
It was scary.
I was afraid that there would be someone better than me, someone he loved more, and that everything I had ever worked for with him would go down the drain. I'm still afraid of that to a point. I think it's because there's nothing for just US. There's nothing that we do, that he won't, or hasn't done with someone else. And that really puts me down in the dumps because I know the friendship we have is something really special and I want something for us that reminds me of that.
For about a year the self harm mostly stopped. When it did, I cried all the time. And if someone fucked with my routine, I would be out of it for at least two days. There was a period of four, where I wouldn't talk to one of my best friends, because she forcibly took a mop and broom from me so she could clean, and I couldn't stop obsessing about it. The only time that I could get it out of my mind, was when I was asleep, but even that was hard to do, because when I was tying to get to that point, I was thinking about what a bitch she was for doing that to me.She, and my other friends worked hard at getting me to a point where I would come out of hiding, but she has took it too far that day, and the only way I could explain it, was that she had broken something in me. I know that's silly to say over a mop and a broom, but it was something that I would do. It was mine, I was comfortable with it, and I was gradually getting better at letting others do it. I was able to let two other people clean, as long as I was there when it happened. I feel like it was the fact that she pushed too hard, too fast that made me resent her. Because things take time. And I was working on it. You can't push something like that too fast. It broke my moral and made me feel like the things that I was trying to work on had not been enough and I had failed.

After three of my friends telling me what a terrible, awful, no good person I am, and leaving me, I was also broken. I had become very close to one individual, and I was actually the third person he ever told that he was gay. I didn't know what to do, because my best friend had started dating a girl that hated the fact that he even tried to teach me how to punch. Apparently hitting people in the chest, with intent to actually make it hurt was considered flirting, and I was also condemned for that. Granted, I wasn't an innocent party, because I was going through some abandonment issues for clear reasons, but I didn't forgive her and still haven't to this day for trying her damnedest to take my best friend away from me. Many people don't know the things I know, but I have children. And most of them remain more loyal to me than to anyone else. When you semi- raise someone and do your best to help them through things, that's what happens.
After all of this, college happened.
I was scared, and alone, and my best friend didn't have the time to text me though out the day. I had just needed the comfort of something familiar, because I was living with two strange people, and one of them hated my guts. (I wasn't overly fond of her and used to steal her water and granola bars because I hated her and that was my passive aggressive way of giving her what she deserved.) She had no personality, she would go to bed at nine pm, and she was rich. I have nothing against wealthy people, except when they can't even be bothered to put themselves in the shoes of the not so wealthy. Apparently paying an extra thousand a year was nothing to her, and we would get into fights over it because she was so stupid about it. Oh, how nice it must be to have mommy and daddy take care of everything.
I put most of my time and effort into running her out of the room, and my other room mate helped me, because she wasn't overly fond of her either and we struck up an amazing bond. Throughout that time period, I dealt with my inability to deal with things, by dying my hair. I actually died it so much that I fried it, and to this very day I am stuck with a huge frizz ball for hair. Gradually, I became friends with people through the theatre of my college, and the laundry room, and that was where I met my first college boyfriend. Looking back on the relationship, I now realize that I dated him out of pity, and was very hurt when that came back at me and he dumped me. I was trying to help him, not the other way around. But everything I've ever tried to do, with or without knowing my intentions, has always come to backfire in my face. It took me a good two months to get over that three month relationship, because it had hurt so bad. My intentions, 99.6% of the time, are always good, I've come to realize. But I'm not very good at how I go about with my good intentions. Because of the fact that I did help him, but he returned the favor by taking me to a City and Colour concert and then dumping me after, I felt little to no self worth and returned to self harm. It was the fact that he hadn't withdrawn from my hugs of gratitude that night that hurt me the most. That concert had meant a lot to me, and he ruined it, and we didn't even get to stay until the end. How inconsiderate and non-communicative he was throughout the relationship had really gotten me down, without me realizing it, and once it was over it had all come flooding to me with no dam to block any of it.
I can still remember the first time I took that knife to my skin. It was a cute little extra-mini swiss army knife. Red with white flowers.
I don't think I sat there and consciously went, "I am going to cut." but it happened to have been on my person while I was going to take a shower.Without really thinking about it, I drew it across my ankle and there was blood. It didn't feel good, but it didn't feel bad either. There was sort of a release that came with it. Nothing mattered but tending to my ankle and making sure that I didn't get blood everywhere.
Honestly, I liked having something to tend to. I could take care of it myself because people who don't have the medical knowledge to slap a piece of toilet paper on it are fucking stupid as shit. I would only do four cuts at a time, and I now know they were deeper than I thought I was making them. I did that about four or five times. No more, because I knew it would get harder to hide. I didn't know, however, that I would adopt it as a coping mechanism.
A few scars here and there didn't bother me, but coming home for winter break did me no good. My parents wouldn't talk to each other. We were over 5 grand in debt, my sister was having troubles dealing with it, so I had to take care of her. And anytime that I tried to get my family into one spot to tell them to cut the shit, my dad would scream at me and take off in the car. My parents were on the brink of divorce and I came home right in the middle of the storm. My mom slept on the couch and was suicidal, my dad slept in the bed and was suicidal, my sister didn't leave her room because she would just get yelled at, and I wasn't as well prepared to come home to that as I should have been.After two months of tears and being the one that everyone leaned on, going back to school was nothing but a spot for me to sit and worry about which parent would kill themself first. I would get a phone call up to four times a day from my mum, looking to me for emotional support that I couldn't even give to myself, but I had to give it to her or she would have been the first to take the leap. And that doesn't count the calls from my sister. At that point in time, I had started looking at the dosage of zoloft it would have taken to kill me, because I had a full bottle sitting on my desk, and my life was falling down around my ears.
Around that time is when I met second college boyfriend. I hated him at first, but gradually found my way past his asshole exterior and grew to love him dearly. We had our fair share of fights, and that's what made the cutting worse. It was usually fights over the cutting, in which he wouldn't talk to me for two hours at a time because of it, which just made me feel worse. It wasn't until I had one of my closer friends talk to him about it, that he figured out that he was making me feel like a disappointment. A lot of the times, when things happened between us, I would blame myself, because I know that I'm an overly emotional person, and I know that it can get in the way of my judgement. Because of that I would cut. Because I couldn't control my emotions enough. I would make him feel bad, and that made me feel like a terrible person. Most of our seven moth relationship was the best, once he learned that he couldn't get mad at me, because I got mad at myself enough for the both of us. And it was smooth sailing. I lived with him for over two months in Chicago, met his parents. It wasn't beautiful. I would throw my temper tantrums, he would lock me out of his room, but in the end we always made up and tried to learn from what we did.  That's when my mother tried to die and everything fell apart. My sister wouldn't come home to help out, my dad couldn't deal with her and trying to keep my mother alive at the same time, so I had to come home. Texting my boyfriend at the time was never easy.We would to three days without talking, and that's when I would start to freak out, and he would get upset because I would call him three times or something. Whatever. Two months later, and two lies of "My phone was dead for four days" he broke up with me, saying he didn't want a long distance relationship because I couldn't go back to college, and that it wasn't me, it was his fault for not looking at his phone, and a bunch of other things. I cut that night, extravagantly, because I had put my all into that relationship and again, was smacked in the face. I was eight days clean after that, and then something happened between my best friend and I, to again, kill what self worth I had built up. But its been two days since, and I'm getting there.
Cutting is a release, that reminds me that I don't want to die, and that I have the will to live. Because when I'm dragging that blade, I know that I could push down just a little harder and end everything, but I don't want to. Trying to stop has been the hardest thing that I have tried to do in my life, because without that reminder, dying seems like the most perfect thing. But I have to work through that. And I have to use the scars that I have to remind myself that there was a point where I could have done it, but I didn't. And that means something.