Published: 2018-06-23T00:00:00.000+01:00
Edited: 2025-02-24T00:00:00.000+00:00
Status: 🌲evergreen

Celebrating nine months since I last self-harmed

Reading time: 4 minutes

It's been nine months since I last hurt myself on purpose.

Nine, amazing months without self-harm.

I could have made an entire human in the time it's been since I last hurt myself. I haven't, but I could have.

And because of that it kinda feels like a huge milestone.

This time last year, I couldn't have imagined going so long without that particular coping strategy.

A year ago I would have struggled to go a week without self harming, let alone nine months.

Somehow, I found the strength inside myself to do what I would once have though impossible. I discovered that I don't need self-harm, that I am not as dependant on it as I once thought I was.

It's still hard, but not as hard as I thought it would be. And it's getting easier all the time.

Yesterday I was having a bad day. I almost had a relapse.

I'm not sure whether there was some sort of anniversary effect from my last relapse, or if it had more to do with it being another anniversary, one that's full of grief.

Being exhausted wouldn't have helped either.

But for whatever reason, I came very close to giving in.

But I didn't.

Instead I took a red marker pen and drew on all the scars I can still see.

There are fewer than I thought there would be; perhaps some have already disappeared beyond my ability to see them. As it was, some of the ones I did draw on were extremely faint.

They've been healing. I've been healing.

I remember when those scars were wounds, red with something other than permanent ink.

I remember having wounds in all stages of healing.

Now they're all at the same stage. Now I only have scars.

Nine months isn't that long in the grand scheme of things. But it is an age for a recovering self-harmer.

So, how did I do it? How did I get to this point?

How did I get to a place where I it's been long enough since I last hurt myself that I barely remember what it felt like?

Having people to support me has been indispensable.

Proper support, not lip service.

The kind of support where you know you can go to someone to say "I'm really close to breaking tonight, can you help me through it?"

The kind of support you can go to for patching up, on the days where it was too much.

Without that support and understanding, getting here would have been much, much harder.

The other important part of my recovery so far has been recording (and celebrating) my wins.

I have a page in my bullet journal that has a calender on it. Every day I don't hurt myself I mark it in green.

If I do end up hurting myself I mark it in red, so that it's recorded as well, but that's less important.

What's important is the green.

I have a green mark for every day of the last nine months. Thee is so much green on that page, and so little red.

And every single one of those green marks is a milestone.

When I was hanging around self-harmer forums I saw a lot of talk about how long people had gone without hurting themselves.

The focus was on the number of days it had been since their last relapse, how long they had been "clean."

I kinda hate that way of talking about it, but hey.

For the people on those forums, that streak was everything, and single slip up seemed to be treated as though it was a signal to give up entirely. That once the streak was broken you were back to hurting yourself regularly again.

I've never found that mindset particularly helpful.

Yeah I have a ninth month streak of not hurting myself under my belt, but if I break that tomorrow that doesn't mean I'm back to where I started.

I had a streak of 67 days without hurting myself prior to the current nine months, and that streak is just as important as the current one.

When staying away from self-harming became too much and I broke, I didn't give in. I picked myself back up and started a new streak, and here I am none months later.

For me, being able to pick myself back up after a relapse is far more important than the number of days it's been since the last one.

That's why I record my successes as well as my relapses. Because then I can work out percentages.

Then I know that for the last year I have only hurt myself 2.2% of days. And for me that's more powerful than the streak.

I know can go for nine whole months without harming myself, but I also know that I can get myself down from self-harming every day to just 2.2% of days.

It's the two in tandem that keep me going, keeps me fighting relapses when try to crop up.

And it's the percentage, and the challenge of keeping it as low as possible, that makes me want to try again if and when I do have a relapse.

I know I'll never really be rid of the urge to hurt myself. It'll always be there, in the back of my mind, lurking. Waiting until I'm at my lowest point to strike.

But I also know that I can fight it. I can fight it for 273 days in a row, and I can fight it down to only getting the better of me 8 days out of the year.

If I break my streak tomorrow it's not the end of the world. I can always start a new streak and try to beat my high score. And I know I'm still smashing it 97.8% of the time.

So no, it won't be the end of the world if I break my streak tomorrow, but I'm hoping I don't. Because I want to be writing about my first 365 day streak without hurting myself.

I can get to that point, I know I can.

Because I know that if I can get to the end of my month my percentage goes up to 99.5%. And if I can make it another two it becomes 100%.

I guess I'll see you in three months.

Originally published at medium.com