I stopped. She was bleeding after all. Perfect lines crossed her wrists, not near any crucial veins, but enough to leave wet red tracks across her skin. She hadn;t hit her veins when she did...

and afterward, after it was done, it was too much, and I felt like I was going to… I don’t know…. explode, and it was just too much, I had to let it out you...

It’s all about self-discipline. Like, self-obsession is connected completely with self-loathing, and it’s the same with, if you’ve got a weight problem. It’s all about… finding some worth in yourself, knowing that you’ve got the...

I can feel the hurt. There’s something good about it. Mostly it makes me stop remembering.

I’m too self-centered to be constructive, so I have to open a vein…

With DID patients, if they feel hostility or aggression they take it out on themselves with self-harm… They’re self-destructive and repeatedly suicidal, more so than any other psychological disorder. So that’s what’s typical – not...

She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that...

Somehow however just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return – if not predictably then nevertheless reliably – was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure a beginning and...

Why can’t I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out...

Oh God just look at me now… one night opens words and utters pain… I cannot begin to explain to you… this… I am not here. This is not happening. Oh wait, it is, isn’t...

She closes her eyes, and I can see the moisture. She’s deep-breathing again, and I notice her hands are clutched around the opposing wrists, nails digging in deep, hard, scratching. Pain to replace pain.

I am not “cured”–I know I never will be. I will always crave that pain to keep me centered. I will always be just a little astounded when I get through a crisis without putting...

Every lineament of the girl’s wasted body is a testament to her inner turmoil. Willow can only imagine what kind of pain she must be in to destroy herself that way. She knows there’s something...