We don’t need role models, we need company
Photography Ramzey Sabbagh
RUBY discusses her experience with self-harm, and reflects on how lockdown has changed the conversation around mental health for the better
By Ruby S
Content Warning - Graphic Description of Self-harm
Sometimes the sun comes through my bedroom window in the morning and illuminates the scars on my arm. This is the only time I ever look at them, when the light is very pure and bright, and my arm is laid out on my pillow.
It looks horrible. The skin is white and purple and knotty, like it’s 100 years old. It has no pores or hair and it doesn’t tan.
During lockdown, very few people saw my body. And when my boyfriend moved abroad for work, even fewer did. It took me a couple of days to realise what this meant; and then, basically, I went nuts. I cut long crescents into my ankle and thigh and elbow. I sealed them with Steri-Strips in the park opposite the pharmacy, and they split open when I walked. Nobody told me off.
The notion that I’m somehow staking a claim to my body is the best explanation I’ve come up with. People don’t always play along. Once a boy put his fingers right inside. Another time, when I was a teenager, a man with glittering eyes asked if it was a sexual thing. Much worse are the people who love me, who cry and shout and beg for an answer I don’t have.
I try to give them metaphors. Although it has never been about dying, it’s something like a secret vial round my neck, for use in times of terribly heightened emotion. It’s a potent fuck-you to all kinds of situations.
Another explanation: sometimes I want a professional to intervene in my feelings, to take me in hand and shake me. Those times, I have calmly taxied myself to A&E, sometimes alone, sometimes with panicked boyfriends who fall asleep in the waiting room. I find the dispassion and protocol of doctors very calming. They have tested, impersonal solutions for my body, and for a long time after I can feel those solutions holding my mind together too. It’s the same reason I like watching the financial news when I’m anxious.
Once I watched the stitches being put in. I had to keep reminding myself that it was my body I was looking at. That was last Christmas, and the doctor had tinsel snowmen hanging from her ears. I was lucky because she had just finished a rotation in plastic surgery. She used special thread and time-consuming techniques, even though it was three in the morning and I had done this to myself. As a result, I don’t mind the scars on my leg. They look like tiger stripes, tapered and graceful, and in the cold they stand out like streaks of ink.
A few times the doctor left the cubicle to get something, and I wanted her to come back so badly that I cried. I wasn’t scared because of what was happening then. I was scared because I had been in this hospital before, on nights when I was younger and this could still feasibly have been a phase.
It was dawn by the time it ended. I stood on the freezing street and tried not to look at the ambulances. My hands were trembling and I threw up. It turned out it was my body, after all.
A few years ago, I thought self-harm was something that had happened in the past. I resented the scars, especially the ones on my arm. I hated how they made me look vulnerable. The scars suggest that I’m nervous and insecure, which I’m not, or that I hate myself, which I don’t.
In summer, concealing the scars can be a full time job. People feel more sorry for you if you wear long sleeves on hot days, so sometimes it is better to let them show. But concealing is an instinct by now, so I eat with just a fork, type with one hand, put the bad arm behind my back, and sit on my hand at work.
Nightmare summer situations include colleagues standing behind my screen while I type; someone passing me a mug while the good hand is occupied; meeting anyone new; steak.
It wasn’t in the past. It’s hard to put into words, but there is a kind of effervescence which builds up over time, and I don’t know how else to release it. My therapist asks, “Do you want to do it now?” And no, I absolutely don’t, not any more than you do. It’s only when the effervescence reaches its peak and bursts. The feeling is rare but it’s unmistakable, and it has only ever ended one way.
I don’t even attempt to explain to the sad boyfriends that when I am sent home with stitches and leaflets I am deeply relieved, because I know it won’t happen again for a long time. I want them to be relieved too.
On Christmas night, I had been sitting around the table with my friends, eating roast chicken and drinking wine. I was having a nice time, but I knew I was going to do it.
I didn’t mean for it to be so extreme. I remember very clearly how I left my drink on the table and planned to return to it. Afterwards, my friend recalled how she had passed me on the stairs. She said if she’d known what I was about to do, she would have restrained me. I did not say what was true, which was that I would have pushed her down the stairs.
But actually, it doesn’t only end one way. I have a friend who I don’t feel ashamed to tell, because we can laugh about it, and that’s very important. So sometimes I call her and say, “I’m doing it, but I want to stop. Can you tell me about something normal?” She tells me about her lunch and her dog and her grandma, boring, comforting things. I laugh and cry and tears fall into my mouth, salty like blood.
I have never read or watched anything about self-harm that I relate to. I find it disturbing and even annoying if anyone else talks about it. Actually I hate all conversations about mental health, especially organized ones. At work I have attended training sessions and awareness workshops, and I feel very bitter towards the people who speak about their experiences. The fact that they are willing to share suggests that they feel very different to the way I do. I am trying to be kinder about that.
Still, I don’t think we’ve got the conversation right. When supermodels and actresses speak out and say that mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, they are using very narrow and palatable definitions. Sometimes, mental illness is something to be ashamed of. It makes people cruel and rude. They (we?) will betray you and scare you and let you down.
One of my closest friends has spent years in various rehab facilities and psychiatric hospitals. When I am not worried about her immediate safety I am usually just angry, not exactly at her but at the cycle of lying and long silences that has fractured our bond. I am angry when she doesn’t ask how I am, and when she can’t remember anything I’ve told her, and when she snaps at bus drivers because she’s forgotten how to be polite. On nights that end with my friend unconscious at 6pm, I sit beside her checking her breathing and sometimes I want her to be ashamed. Of course, people also get bored when they sit with me for hours in hospital waiting rooms. My friend ruins Saturdays, I ruin Christmas, and empathy has a limit.
During the first lockdown, I walked my neighbour’s dog for a couple of months. She spent a long time on a psychiatric ward and is afraid, in the best of times, to leave the house. She is pale and unengaged. She doesn’t make eye contact and she always wears a dressing gown. This is a million miles away from whatever my friend in the Priory is, and she is a million miles away from me, and not one of us is like the celebrities in campaigns. We are not all in it together: some of us can afford therapists.
I’m doing it too though, right, in writing this? I think the pandemic, as brutal as it has been, has changed the way we talk about mental health at root level. On Teams calls my colleagues regularly talk about how lonely they are, how bored, how desperate they feel, and they do so with an unfiltered honesty that I could not have imagined a year ago. These conversations are different to the ones I hated in workshops. They are rawer and more intimate, and they are happening live. That last bit is especially important, because sometimes mental illness makes a good story, and in retelling it the drama can overshadow the essential dreariness of whatever we went through.
My hospital trips, for example, have taken on a kind of legendary quality in my mind, with all the most shocking and vivid details at the fore. I see it from above, a big bad thing that happened to someone else once. I cannot really remember the bleak conversations that followed, or the itching as scars formed, or the drenching shame. But when we tell our colleagues we are sick of the same four walls, or that we can no longer motivate ourselves to go to the supermarket, we are being honest about the banal realities of emotional pain. I see that as true progress.
For a year now, we have all been steeped in the idea that we must pay for our physical health with our mental wellbeing. It’s not always articulated like this, but when we say we can’t stand the lockdown for much longer, it’s what we mean. We don’t need celebrities with unrecognizable gilded lives to tell us it’s okay to feel bad — we need our bosses, our dads, our friends to say it. We need to hear people who understand our lives expressing the feelings we recognize, in a language that means something to us. We don’t need role models: we need company.
When I wrote the first draft of this, I found that I was proud of it. I even shared it with some friends who had never witnessed my self-harm first-hand, and they were so kind and so insightful. When it is summer, and these friends drink in their freedom with me in parks and gardens, and we are so happy to see each other in glorious 3D, I might take off my jacket and let the sun warm the skin of my arms.
If this piece has triggered you or if you’re struggling with your mental health, please feel free to read through our resource pack.
