Well as you can probably guess I didn't start hurting myself thinking that it was going to turn into an addiction. Now that I've stopped I looked back on when I started doing this and I guess I've kind of been doing this all my life. Little things when I was younger, but as I got older they didn't grow with me. However when I was a sophomore in high school i guess it more or less exploded. A lot of family things were going on and i didn't know how to cope. I remember one day my Mom and Dad where busy doing something for my brother. It snowed that day and school was dismissed early. My parents had to pick me up because i didn't have my drivers liscence yet. My parents were at the school administration building so they had to know school was let out early (I later found out they did infact know) but they didn't so up until well after we were let out. She was even late to pick me up if it was a normal day. My mom didn't stay at home with me. She just kind of dropped me of and told me to make dinner. I went through the pantry trying to decide what to make when a can of juice fell on my foot. It didn't hurt and honestly almost even felt good. I didn't do it again until later that year when things were equally as stressful in my house, and when i had the feeling of being forgoten about. However it didn't really get "bad" until after the begining of my junior year in high school. To be more specific it was the begining of October. I was just so overwhelmed and I seemed so alone. I came home from what ever i was doing that day, and found a hammer. I dont' know what I was thinking. I guess i was just recalling the times i've dropped cans on my foot. I hit myself a few times with the hammer and ended up with a bruise about the size of a quarter. It didn't hurt that much. I should have been in tears, but i wasn't. I felt alive after it and after that it was atleast a weekly accurance. I stuck with bruising mainly until about febuary of my Junior year in high school. By that time i'd been self injuring for a year. I had a piece of broken glass in my room. I'm not sure why I did, but well i did. I pressed it against my forearm and manage to draw a little bit of blood. It didn't feel as good, so I continued to stick with giving myself bruises. I went to work as a summer camp counsilor that summer. It was great fun, but since i was working with 9 and 10 year olds primarily I couldn't really give myself huge bruises. I showed up at comap with one and it just raised huge questions. I didn't like it. I told people lies and i'm not sure if they believed me. All summer i was afraid i'd do it, and even came close several times. Some how i managed to go from that whole summer. However when i went back to self injury, i started doing it at a higher intesity and more frequently. The bruises got bigger, and I started to cut. I would have bruises so bad that i couldn't even walk comfortably. I actualy started cutting around my bruises. i started to run out of clean leg and needed to find a new alternative. Plus when I cut the bruises started to vanish faster. Eventualy the cutting won out over bruising. It took more work to bruise, and frankly it was harder to cover and make lies for. So my legs and upper left fore arm became the targets. By this point i was completely and totaly hooked on cutting.
