*blows the dust off this blog*
It's been a while since I last wrote.
Anyway here's a thing that I want to write about that is perhaps too long for twitter.
--trigger warning---
I work at a gay dance club now, part-time, and I stamp people's arms at the door. I have to insist that it's the left arm, on the forearm, so that the bouncer can check the same place every time. Also they think that sweat might rub it off if I stamp on the wrist or palm. I see many forearms with many horizontal scars on them, that look like self-harm scars. Sometimes you know they're self-harm scars because people are reluctant to roll up their sleeves to get stamped, or they put their arm away quickly after you've stamped them. It's kind of sad and strange and odd. I don't want to pity them, but it's sad that self-harm occurs so often amongst queer people. Maybe people who go to dance clubs alone are a little sad. Although. There isn't a control group to look at the frequency of self-harm scars occurring in people who go to straight clubs, so I can't say that self-harm on wrists occurs more often amongst queer people.
It's just interesting. And odd? That one of the first times I saw self-harm scars was in a queer pub in london. I didn't want to be impolite, but it was triggering for me. I didn't want to look at it because it reminded me of my own self-harming, and I might have had a disgusted look on my face. I don't think self-harm scars are disgusting; it's just a bit scary for me. They remind me of what I've done before, and I have mixed emotions toward it. It's also scary because it looks so painful. I didn't know how to react the first time I saw them on another person, because it was so obvious what they were, and I was trying to forget that I self-harmed, or put it as far into my past as possible, because at that time I had only been a few months clean.
Self-harm scars are beautiful, in their own way. Not that I'm glamorizing the act that produced them, but the fact that the person is okay enough with themselves to wear short sleeves is beautiful. It seems to me that they are accepting that part of themselves and their past and they are not afraid for people to see what they have done. They accept that their brokenness is part of themselves, and it doesn't make them any less of a person. They are confident enough not to have to hide their scars anymore. That is my interpretation at least, and the fact that the person is wearing short sleeves might just be because they're tired of feeling too hot in the summer.
Another reaction is that I don't feel so alone in my self-harming anymore. I think that fact might have been more helpful when I was 14 or so, but it's still relevant to me now, though not as much. Not that self-harming is an activity to be celebrated by any means, it's just that when you're 14 and self-harming, you think that you're the strangest, most broken thing in the universe. You don't know that it's a "thing", that other people do it, that it sometimes it's a legitimate reaction to stress or trauma. You just know that you do it, and it makes you weird and sad and abnormal. I treated it as a secret that no one should know, and that it made me damaged, in some way. Seeing evidence of other people self-harming makes me think that I'm not the only broken person in the world, and that it is okay to have self-harmed. I don't feel so abnormal; I have baggage, just like everyone else. I don't have to be ashamed that I have self-harmed, and I don't have to treat it as this thing that I have to declare to people I want to have close friendships with. It's not something I have to confess. It just is.
As I said, I still don't know what to feel about my self-harming. Some part of me is still proud of my scars; "here, see, I have acquired them in battle and therefore I am tough" but I know that it's not a thing to be celebrated. But then again my scars are so tiny and indistinct that I have to point them out, so they aren't really things I can show off. I'm embarrassed that I self-harmed, and that I had to resort to doing it. I used to be angry at myself for being "weak" and for having to self-harm. But another part accepts that this is who I was, and it makes me who I am. It happened, they exist, and they won't go away. I'm trying not to self-harm again. It's easier now that I haven't done it in a while.
My reaction to seeing self-harm scars is a little complicated, but it becomes normal and everyday when you have to stamp many arms every night. It's work. It's business. That's how I'd like the rest of the world to treat self-harm scars.
