Carlamary's Wiki Page

I admire that so much, especially that you had the courage to admit it.  This girl is about 14 but she was cutting her self when she was just 13.  She cuts herself on her rist and people do notice.  I think she is not strong enough not to do it.  I think that she think its the way out, but i cant stress to her enought that there are people she can talk to.  She has anxiety problems and is seeing a theripist so i am hoping that she is getting all the help possible.  Besides all that depressing stuff, i love your blogs, honestly they are so interesting.  If you don't mind me asking, how old are you? I am only 13 but for a school project in IT we had to do a blogging project and thats how i came across you site. Love it.

Take care

Natasha xx

I think girls cut themselves for a variety of reasons. Being a young female is not easy. There's study, career, boys, self-image, figure, weight, hair, skin, sex, growing up - all kinds of things that bring confusion, anxiety and pain. And a lot of times, some of us don't feel that we are in control of any of it. Cutting feels as if we are in control, even if only for a little while.

 

When I was doing it, I was ashamed of what I was doing. It was my secret. I didn't want people to know what I was doing. I never let my mother or my sister see me without clothes after I had begun cutting myself (although my sister knew what I was doing - but she didn't know what to say to me). I cut my upper legs, inside my thighs, and my lower tummy, where I thought people wouldn't see. Now of course, I have scars, a couple of which can't be hidden by a bikini.

 

I started cutting myself when I was about sixteen and I stopped after I left high school. But then things went wrong at university and I started again for a while.

 

I got through it. Yep, I was depressed at high school and in my first years at university - especially in the last year of high school. Yep, there were times when things hurt so much that I thought I could not survive it. I stopped when I was around 19 or 20. I graduated from university, with a good GPA. I'm a solicitor now (a lawyer, in North America). I've survived. I still remember how painful it was at times to be 16 and 17, but I got through. Most girls do.

 

Cutting yourself is nothing to be ashamed off. It's good to not do it, or to work through things and be able to stop. But many young women have done it at some stage in their lives.  

 

There's a woman who I much admire back in my home town. She's a judge in a lower court and is being talked of as a possible candidate for the Supreme Court. A group of us female lawyers were talking one night and the subject of depression in young females came up (did you know that in Australia, about 10% of females aged 18-24 suffer from some form of affective mental disorder - depression, mania, dysthymia, hypomania, bipolar affective disorder? - I'm told the percentage is similar in North America). This female judge in her late 40s was there. With more courage than I thought I had, I admitted to this group of women lawyers that I had cut myself when I was 16 and had stopped when I was about 20. A couple of the women there looked at me as if I needed to be placed in a straight-jacket and carted off to an asylum. Then another woman lawyer in the group said that she also had cut herself regularly when she was a teenager. The female judge then said in a soft voice that she too had cut herself from about the time that she was 16 until around 20 - and she is now a well respected judge