More Excerpts

"A Bright Red Scream"

"we all use psycological defenses from ime to time to modulate anxiety."

"they cut themselves to feel alive and to end the experience of blankness, of not existing."

"in addition to being a life-sustaining and sanity-maintaining way of managing inner states,cutting is a primitive yet powerful form of communication for people unable to adequately verbalize their feelings. self-mutalation provides concrete expression for the pain they feel inside- a language written on the body, through blood, wounds, and scars."

"cutting redefines the body's boundaries, differentiating self from others."

"blood flowing from the wound proves there is life inside the body instead of nothingness."

"cutting serves as a literal representation of the disruption or hole in the child's inner world"

"bleeding became forthem real, tangiable evidence that - i do exist somewhere in this world."

'i remeber what it felt like to see the blood-it was beautiful."

"the blood told me i was alive"

"cutting is a way of marking the body's boundaries, or proving what is inside the body."

"how dare God love someone like me" - " but i know he does. and when i'm through arguing with him, he will let me crawl up in his lap and hold me."

"self-mutilation can be an effort to avoid a state of disorganization where you don't really know what reality is."

""the body is indeed the temple of the soul. cutters are living proof that whenthe body is ravaged, the soul cries out. and when the soul is trampled on, the body bleeds."

"the bodies must be constantly proven"

"self-cutting is never as satisfying as emotional catharsis and leads to a strong temptation to cut more frequently or to find other modes of bodily communication."

"underneath the mask of self-sufficency ; anorexics, cutters and bulimics suffer from an insatiable hunger for : food, love, contact with eachother, approval, and nuturance."

"from the day i started cutting it was obvious to me that if i couldnt speak somethign could speak for me"

"cutting proves that you are alive, that you have a soul, that you are not dead on the inside. in fact you are powerful."
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"americans spend billions of dollars every year sculpting their faces and bodies to conform to societies standards of beauty: breaking and reshaping noses, pumping their lips full of collegen, suckingaway fat, enlarging breasts, transplanting hair, lengthing penises, even injecting bacteria into the face that casues botulism to smooth out wrinkles. is it any more devient to cut burn or puncture the flesh to flout societies conventions than to emulate them?"
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""when blood is drawn thats a sacrifice their making in blood and pain."

"body piercing, tattooing, and scarification hae become the modern day equivelents of initiation rites."

"in a culture that is ever more transient - where half of all marriages end in divorce, employment is no longer for life, and few people are born and die in the same community- a tattoo or scar can be grounding."

"just as self-mutalation is a way of preserving life and avoiding suicide, other forms of cutting can be a way of defying death- of both honoring and denying its power, of coming closer as one can to the brink without crossing over."