I've Never Counted All My Scars.

I Would venture to say I have more than 50. Over half of those are from less than 2 years ago. My oldest scar is on my chin. I got it when I was 3 at the mall. I slipped on the edge of a marble fountain and it sliced open my chin. It scared my dad alot. It was a good thing the hospital was just across the street. When I was 5 I got chicken pox and as a result I have two pinprick like scars on my face. Once my finger got slammed in a door and cut it open. I was in second grade at the time. So I had to get stiches, and now I have a scar from that too. I have a few small scars from pimples. Also, I have one really faint scar from a deep cat scratch. This is my favorite scar because its from my old cat that died and it helps me remember him. When I was 13 I became super depressed and I started burning my wrist with a curling iron. I only did it because I was angry and wanted pain. I didn't intend on it to scar. But it did. Yet I still continued to burn myself for awhile. I got about 5 scars from that. They aren't real bad and noone really notices them. But my parents didn find out about them. Since my curling iron was confiscated, I started playing with my razor and cut on my hips. My jeans and shorts hid those cuts. Athough they weren't deep, they didn't go away so I still have thin pink marks there. and that was about 2 years ago. I got too into my razor and moved on to injuring my thighs. Soon it got to the point that I couldn't wear shorts without exposing the cuts. But my razor wasn't doing enough. It only made short shallow cuts. So I got scissors and cut the 3 blades out of my razor. Then I could push the blade deeper into my skin. I started cuting vertically on my hips and thigh over top my horizontal scars. So now I have some deeper long scars criss crossing over some thiner ones. These vertical scars aren't as smooth. They might be kiloids. Anyhow, I got addicted to this kind of behaivor and it went unnoticed for over a year. Then one day I was thrown over the edge because of a really bad break up. I took my razor blade and took my emotional pain out on my arm. The same arm with my burn scars. I drug the blade lenghth ways and closed my eyes, digging in deep. pulling the blade inward. I opened my eyes to see a really deep 4 inch long gash spewing blood. I did it again. I repeated the cutting with my eyes closed again and again, not opening them between cuts. I had to focus on feeling the pain. When i opened my eyes, my whole arm was covered it a sheet of blood. It dripped down into my bath water, i subbmerged my arm in the water to rinse off the blood so I could see my cuts. I saw them. Thin, long, and deeper than normal. I was angered at myself for making them so thin. It meant i wasn't pulling the blade down my arm fast enough. I wanted deep and wide gashes. One that would bleed until there was no blood left. I could do better. I closed my eyes and drug the blade fast and hard. I rinsed my arm off again. I had made a nice cut. Deeper and wider. I did another one the same way. And then a 3rd for good measure. As I was cutting my 3rd deep cut I felt a sharper more tense pain than I had on the other 2. I knew I had done well. I rinsed my arm in the bath again and I barely made out the lines of my cuts. Even though the blood was mixing with the water it was still too dark to see the cuts. My entire bath water was a rusty color. I held my arm under the faucet and rinsed it with clean clear water. Then I saw the cuts. I noticed how my 3rd deep cut ran into my 1st deep cut. They ran together for 2 inches, making the cut deeper than the others. I saw my skin pulling apart about a centimeter wide. This is my worst scar. I hoped I would bleed out and die maybe. I didn't want to have to deal with it. It was obvious that it would need stitches. I let it bleed. I even pulled the skin further apart with my fingers to make it bleed more. When I got out of the bath, I put a pile of toilet paper on my arm to absorb the blood so it wouldn't drip and leave a tell tale mess. but the toilet paper got immediantly sogging and the bottom layer of it clug to my cuts. I had to pick it out, and then I wrapped my arm in hand towel and an old t shirt and secured it with tape. I went to bed hoping to not awake in the morning. But i did. and the t shirt was soaked and the towel too with what seemed to be a pint of blood, maybe even more. Parts of the shirt were crusty but for the most part it was damp. I had a standardized test at school that morning, so I knew better than to skip. I wore long sleeves of course. It was a navy hoodie. I didn't bother to bandage the wounds. i just let them be. I didnt want the bandage to stick to them and cause them to bleed again when I pulled it off. Sometime during the test, I noticed my sleeve was stuck to my arm. I immediantly pulled it off and I started to feel my arm rebleed. I must have been in testing for a long time, because I remember going straight to lunch after ward. At lunch I told my friend that she needed to see something. We actually weren't too close of friends but she was really accepting of everyone, so I thought she would be the best person to tell. We went to the bathroom to get some privacy when i showed her my cuts. She gasped at them and told me how horrible they were, and that when I realized that the 2 cuts that merged were so deep I could see my fat cells under it. I was freaked. My friend said they would need stiches or they would scar. Well, my dad ended up checking me out of school that day. He had gone into my room while I was at school and found my bloody towel and shirt. He took me to the doctor and the docted cleaned my arm and gave me stiches. He then submitted me to a mental hospital. Anyhow, back to my scars. So all of those cuts ended up scaring. It sucks. And because of that experience my parents locked away all knives, razors, lighters, and matches from me. Even medicine and scissors. But they forgot my pencil sharpener. So I later used that sparingly on my ankles. So I have a few small scars on my ankles too. I wore arm bands and wrist bands to cover my arm scars in the summer, since it was too hot to wear long sleeves. I stopped wearing shorts though, because of my thighs, and I didn't wear sandals for awhile when my ankle cuts were still fresh. I was really ashamed of all my scars. and I only had 2 wrist bands to cover them. Many people asked why I always wore those wrist bands. I didn't tell them why. I would just say I really liked them. During the summer I didn't go swimming, and I didn't the next summer either. Strangely enough, by that time, I was still wearing the same armbands. Actually, i had aquired one more. The end of this summer, I started dating a new guy. He was really nice and we talked openly to each other. I told him about my scars and my depression and how I still sometimes hurt myself, but not as bad. Eventually I showed him my scars. He was really encouraging and told me they weren't that bad. I wanted to believe him, so I did. He wanted me to stop wearing armbands. I started out not wearing them only on days when we had a date, then more frequently, soon I wasn't ever wearing my wristbands. One day, my sister's friend asked about my scars. I was shocked. My boyfriend had said they weren't that noticable and that even if people saw them, they would be polite enough not to ask. At first I didn't know how to respond to my sister's friend, so I just shrugged. He asked again later, when noone was around, and I told him the truth, and how I'm trying not to be ashamed of my scars. He was satisfyed with that answer. I was scared others would ask about my scars. And they did. I had to confess to my really good friend. We went to different schools so we really didn't get to see each other often. But it felt really good to tell her the truth. She didn't judge me at all. Quite a few people at school have asked about my scars too. A group of people asked in my ceramics class and I felt ashamed and cornered. I said that I had cut myself a long time ago, and that I was trying not to be ashamed of my past. Later that day, a friend of mine ,cleo, in that class told me how great she thought it was that I wasn't hiding my scars anymore. Anyhow, before this time, I had let a few select people in on my secret. But i was still wearing my wristbands at the time. Cleo has been in classes with me for 3 years and she never knew about my scars until that day. She is really encouraging. It feels better to wear my scars openly. I like that I don't worrry anymore about who will see them. When anyone asks I tell them the truth. I feel free now.