Fiona Apple
Fiona Apple, a famous singer and songwriter, was raped outside of her apartment at the age of twelve. She become afraid and would check her closets to make sure now one was hiding there for many years. She was nervous around other men and developed sleep difficulties because of violent dreams. She then developed an eating disorder and is frustrated at the misunderstanding of it. She says, "I definitely had an eating disorder. What was really frustrating for me was that everyone though I was anorexic, and I wasn't. I was really depressed and self-loathing. For me, it wasn't about being thin, it was about getting rid of the bait attached to my body. A lot of it came from the self-loathing that came from being raped at the point of developing my voluptuousness. I just thought that if you had a body and if you had anything on you that would be grabbed, it would be grabbed. So I did purposely get rid of it." As a result of this, Fiona Apple became very thin and the media just said that she was "trying to fit in"
When Fiona read her first bad review she began scratching her wrist with her fingernails. She scratched all the way up her arm and there are still some dark patches on her wrists, where she dug the deepest. Fiona says, "I have a little bit of a problem with that. It's a common thing." When asked if it makes her feel better she simply replies, "It just makes you feel." Fiona also bites her lips as hard as she can until they bleed. "And it'll be bleeding, and I can't stop, because it almost feels so good when I bite my lip." To explain her actions she says, "It was never, like, 'I am going to hurt myself and put myself in the hospital.' ...It is that I am going to give myself the pain that I need to feel to put the punctuation on this shit that's going inside."
Fiona is upset by how the public reacted to her revelations of her self-injury. She says, "The most annoying thing for me to hear about myself is that I'm trying to make people have a pity party for me. Everything that I've gone through has been dramatized by the people who've written about it, not by me. I'm just saying, 'This happened to me, this happened to a lot of people.' Why should I hide shit? Why does that give people a bad opinion of me? It's a reality. A lot of people do it. Courtney Love pulled me aside at a party and showed me her marks."
Drew Barrymore
Drew was three years old when she first met her father and he threw her against a wall in an alcoholic rage. Drew talks about her father, "I really love him. I hated him while I was growing up. He was an abusive asshole. But now that I've grown up, I do love him. For a crazy person he's the most intelligent, fascinating man I've ever met, but he is crazy. Omigod, he's insane!"
Drew was eleven months old when she starred in her first commercial, one for puppy dog food. At age seven she became a hit because of her role in E.T. Her life began to go downhill soon after. She first got drunk at age nine, smoked marijuana at age ten, and snorted cocaine at age twelve. She tried to commit suicide at age thirteen by slashing her wrists with a butcher knife. After that all-time low she entered rehab, not for the first time, but this stay was successful. To celebrate her triumph over drugs she emancipated herself from her parents control at age fifteen. A year later she published her autobiography, "Little Girl Lost" She began starring in sexually loaded films, and modeled for Guess? jeans. Slowly, she began showing herself to be a great actress and has become a famous star.
Drew Barrymore explains how she looks at herself, "I know I'm not ugly but I don't think I'm a pretty girl. I'm very critical of myself, definitely. There's one thing about my body that I truly, truly hate. I hate my arms! I have really fat arms! They're like sacks! I always really wanted those long, lanky, thin, model-like arms, but I don't have them. There's nothing I can do about it." She admits that she occasionally has periods of depression, "I used to get into wallowing depressions that would last for months. So, like, fucking Camille-esque, you know? Now they're very sporadic." Drew used to mutilate her arms during her early teenage years.
Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp, a young actor well known for his past "bad boy" behavior, was born in Owensboro, Kentucky in 1963. Johnny says, "As a teenager I was so insecure. I was the type of guy that never fitted in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition too." Even today he still has feelings of insecurity about himself. He says, "My self-image it still isn't that alright. No matter how famous I am, no matter how many people go to see my movies, I still have the idea that I'm that pale no-hoper that I used to be. A pale no-hoper that happens to be a little lucky now. Tomorrow it'll be all over, then I'll have to go back to selling pens again." He dropped out of high school during his teens and became a musician. Over the years he has had problems with drinking, has done drugs, and had casual sex with strangers.
Johnny has a series of scars on one arm where he has cut himself with a knife on different occasions to commemorate various rites of passage in his life. He says, "It was really just whatever [times when he hurt himself]--good times, bad times, it didn't matter. There was no ceremony. It wasn't like 'Okay, this just happened, I have to go hack a piece of my flesh off.'" Johnny explains his self-injury, "My body is a journal in a way. It's like what sailors used to do, where every tatoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist." Johnny has several tattoos, such as the one that says 'Wino Forever' (used to be 'Winona Forever" when he was dating the famous actress, Winona Ryder).
Richey Edwards
Richey James Edwards, an individual somtimes referred to as a "poster child" of self-injury, was born on December 22, 1966. He grew up under his Grandmother's care in Blackwood until he was thirteen because his parents couldn't afford to take care of him.
He joined the band, "The Manic Street Preachers," after they had released the single, "Suicide Alley."
Richey purposely alienated himself from people, he said, "I hate so many people, I'm scared if I met them, they'd probably turn out to be OK - so I never wanna give myself the option! I distance myself from everybody so I can always completely hate them." While in the band he suffered from deepening alcoholism and anorexia, he also went through long bouts of depression and insomnia, and self-injury. He had suffered from self-injury since he was a teenager. On May 15, 1991 Richey carved "4 Real" on his forearm with a razor blade. The wound required seventeen stitches, and was done while Richey was involved in a discussion with an NME Live Reviews Editor at the Time. He later said, "I tried talking to Steve for an hour to explain ourselves [The Manic Street Preachers]...I didn't abuse him or insult him. I just cut myself. To show that we are no gimmick, that we are pissed off. That we are for real." By the end of 1993 he had started stubbing cigarettes out on his arm. Also, at a concert in Thailand, he appeared with his chest slashed open by knives a Thai fan had sent him. Early in 1994 Richey entered a rehabilitation clinic.
On February 1, 1995 Richey drove to his Cardiff apartment and disappeared, leaving behind his passport and credit cards. He was reported missing and his abandoned car was found on the Severon Bridges outside of Bristol, a place notorious for suicides. Police presumed he was dead by the time summer came around. People still wonder if Richey is still alive and occassionally there are "sightings" of him."I am very interested in what people would think if I died. Whatever anyone thinks of me, whatever happens to me, at least I'll know that I tried to be a person. I set out to be something worthwhile that meant something real and valuable; to talk about ideas and attitudes that are important and real, and that no one else is saying or is too scared to speak of; to be the influence to people that I never had when I was growing up."
"When I cut myself I feel so much better. All the little things that might have been annoying me suddenly seem so trivial because I'm concentrating on the pain. I'm not a person who can scream and shout so this is my only outlet. It's all done very logically."
"I find it attractive. I find it...sexual."
"Yes [that he injured himself], and I drank a lot...I thought I was strong and my body and spirit could take the punishment, but I was wrong. I was weak. In the end I found I just couldn't physically get out of bed and I didn't understand why. It's very important for me to understand things. Like, last summer I'd sit thinking about the smallest things over and over. But it's difficult to live in that frame of mind. It means you can't move. Back then I was living on my own, without anyone to speak to. I didn't even have a telephone."
"It's about people who take their frustration out on everyone around them. I never raise my voice. Cutting myself or hurting myself is the way I deal with anger."
"I've never hit anybody in my life. I never would, and the only way I could make a point was by hurting myself...It's something I've done since I was a teenager."
"Self abuse is anti-social, aggression still natural."
I eat and I dress and I wash and I still can say thank you Puking - shaking - sinking I still stand for old ladies Can't shout, can't scream, hurt myself to get pain out
Manic Street Preachers, "Yes"
Roses in the hospital
Stub cigarettes out on my arm
Roses in the hospital
Want to feel something of value
Roses in the hospital
Nothing really makes me happy
Roses in the hospital
Heroin is just too trendy
Roses in the hospital
Try to pull my finger nails out
Roses in the hospital
I want to cling to something soft
Roses in the hospital
Progressing like a constant war
Roses in the hospital
There's no one to feel ashamed for
Manic Street Preachers, "Roses in the Hospital"
"It's about people who hurt themselves in order to concentrate, or just to feel something."
(explanation of the song, "Roses In The Hospital)
Scratch my leg with a rusty nail, sadly it heals
Manic Street Preachers, "Die in the Summertime"
Get some pain and I feel alive - born to end
Close my eyes overdose on hell - born to end
Get run over by no direction - born to end
Breathing dead and I'm born to end - born to end
Manic Street Preachers, "Born To End"
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie, a young actress, was born in 1975 to famous parents, both actors. She grew up in Los Angeles and studied at the Lee Strsberg Insitute. She appeared in five student films for her filmaker brother, James Haven Voight, as well as in music videos for the Rolling Stones, Meat Loaf, the Lemonheads, and Lenny Kravitz. Angelina had a short modeling career with Finesse Modeling Agency, in which she appeared in numerous fashion layouts. In 1996 she got married to Jonny Lee Miller, a British actor, while wearing a white shirt with her fiance's name written on it in her blood.
Angelina has hurt herself often in the past. She explains, "You're young, you're crazy, you're in bed and you've got knives. So shit happens." She talks about her past self-injury, "This person asked me about cutting myself when they saw a scar. I'm very open, but because of that, people think that they know everything about me, and, actually, they don't know anything. I say things that other people might go through. That's what artists should do - throw things out there and not be perfect and not have answers for anything and see if people understand. But this person made the cutting sound interesting, like it was something I do now. [For the record, she did, but doesn't now, and doesn't endorse it.] And then I met somebody who said they'd seen movies of mine and then showed me where they had cut themselves. I had to explain, first off, not to do that. But it made me really fucking angry at the people who represent me in a way that would get that person to do that and show me. don't understand why people would want to use something so damaging. It's like, let's make me look 'cool' and worry a lot of people in my family." Angelina has the Japanese symbol for "death" tattooed on her shoulder, and the Latin words, 'Quod me nutrit me destruit,' on her stomach, meaning "What nourishes me also destroys me."
Courtney Love
Courtney Love, outspoken and often times controversial singer and actress, was born in San Francisco in 1965. Her parents, who have been living a hippie lifestyle, divorced when Courtney was very young. As a child she was diagnosed as being autistic and went to therapy for several years. She went wild during her teenage years and was expelled from school, had many conflicts with teachers, and was arrested for shoplifing. At age sixteen she dropped out of high school.
Courtney formed her band, "Hole," in 1989 with her friend, Eric Erlandsen. Her husband, Curt Cobain, killed himself in 1994, and Courtney was accused of "murdering" him by angry Nirvana (Curt's band) and Hole fans.
Courtney went through a period of self-injury; she would cut herself while she was dancing and whenever she was "working through an emotional trauma." While talking about Curt's constant overdoses she says, "Some people OD. I've never ODed, ever. I've gotten really fucking blasto, but instead of ODing, I chatter and start talking too much, screaming and running around naked and getting hysterical, cutting my arms, you know, crazy shit. Breaking windows. But I never have fallen on the floor blue."
"I have many [self-destructive bones], and I've broken a bunch. I think self-destructiveness is given a really bad rap. I think that self-destructiveness can also mean self-reflection, can mean poetic sensibility, it can mean empathy, it can mean a hedonism and a libertarianism and a lack of judgement."
Marilyn Manson
Marilyn Manson was born in Canton, Ohio to Episcopalian parents, a smothering mother and a volatile father suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. As a child he was terrified of the apocolypse and the Antichrist, fears introduced by a grade-school teacher. Manson described himself as an adolescent "worm" with no self-esteem, surrounded by a dysfunctional family and hypocrital, emotionally abusive peers at school and church. As a teenager, Manson stole, and later experimented with black magic, drugs and rock music. Later, after he had formed his band, he would perform bizzare on-stage antics, abused drugs, self-injurered, and did other self-destructive things.
Self-injury became a "hobby" of Manson, and the fans who copied his actions. He would cut himself on stage, scar his skin, and got numerous tattoos of demonic figures on his body. He had about 450 scars at the publishing of his book,`"Long Hard Road out of Hell." It was unfortunate that his fans chose to self-injure because of him, and two particular girls stand out. These girls followed Manson and would carve the words "Marilyn" and "Manson" on each other's chests and would show up at the concert in the front row with blood from their wounds dripping down their tank tops. Today he says [about his self-injury], "I think that in the past, I put myself voluntarily in situations of physical pain because I didn't feel anything on an emotional level. It's the reason behind, I found, behind this attraction. That said, I believe that I've evolved since the day that I felt emotions."
"The only way to get out of hell is to go through all the way, to the very bottom."
Shirley Manson
Shirley Manson, the sexy, red-haired singer of Garbage, was an angry child. She was teased, tormented, and even beaten-up by her classmates because of her looks. Classmates called her names such as "posh," "bloodhound," and "frog-eyed" because of her red hair and green eyes. As she grew older she became unhappy and violent, and planned to drop out of high school when she turned sixteen. A certain teacher began ridiculing her until, "Until, I think, everyone in that school thought I was less than human. I felt ugly, weak, overwhelmed - I couldn't imagine being capable of doing anything. I certainly never thought I could be in a band. This was a dream i didn't even occur to me to dream about." Shirley took up smoking, boys and drinking, she began using drugs on a regular basis during her late teens. In 1995, Shirley andher band released the self-titled, "Garbage," their debut album, which became an instant hit. The lyrics of her songs are well known for revealing her true emotions and feelings.
Shirley Manson has a low self-esteem and hates the way she looks. "I feel disgusting. I could take a knife to my throat for the way I look. Can someone just put a bin or a bag or a fucking bomb on my head?" Shirley says her melancholy comes from growing up "desperately unhappy, despite a perfect upbringing. I was convinced I was the ugliest creature that ever lived, that everybody hated me and the only way to deal with it was to be as unpleasant as possible." As a teenager her feelings of weakness and of being overwhelmed were manifested in cutting. She would snip the safety guards off Bic razors and would cut up her arms.
Lyrics from the song, Medication:
"Somebody get me out of here, I'm tearing at myself.
Nobody gives a damn about me, or anybody else..."
Princess Diana
Diana, Princess of Wales, was born on July 1, 1961 to the Viscount and Viscountess of Althorp. Diana's parents divorced when she was six, her mother leaving her father for another man.
During the rest of her childhood she shuttled back and forth between two households. At age fourteen, she had described herself as hopeless and a poor student.
Diana began purging the night before her marriage to Prince Charles, having discovered that her fiance was in love with another woman. During her marriage she felt no control over her life, it was a repeat of the pain and betrayal of her childhood.
In a 1995 BBC television interview Diana revealed to the world that she was a self-injurer. She said that she had cut her arms and legs, explaining, "You have so much pain inside yourself that you try and hurt yourself on the outside because you want help." "Diana: Her True Story," a biography written on the princess said that Diana had thrown herself into a glass cabinet at Kensington palace at various times, slashed her wrists with a razor, and cut herself with the serrated edge of a lemon slicer. Once, during a heated argument with Prince Charles, she picked up a penknife and cut her chest and thighs. Her husband still scorned her, and thought she was faking her problems, that it was melodramatic attention seeking. During a fight on an airplane, Diana locked herself in the bathroom, cut her arms, and smeared the blood over the cabin walls and seats. Another time she threw herself down the stairs.
Diana died on August 31, 1997 in an automobile accident with her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, while trying to evade the paparazzi. She was a courageous women, and gave further prominence to the problem of self-injury.
Christina Ricci
Christina Ricci, an actress since childhood, was born in Santa Monica, California to a lawyer-psychiatrist father and real estate agent mother in 1980. She was discovered at the age of seven and a year later made her screen debut in Mermaids (1990), in which she played Cher's daughter. She showed herself to be a talented, adult actress in the movie, the Ice Storm, in which she played a sexually precocious fourteen-year-old. Christina, a compulsive talker and smoker, is known for her outspokenness on a large number of controversial topics.
In a US magazine interview Christina explains a small, smile-shaped scar on her hand. "I was trying to impress Gaby [Hoffmann, her best friend]. So I heated up a lighter and pressed it on my hand." She reveals other burn scars on her arms and says, "I wanted to see if I can handle pain. It's sort of an experiment to see if I can handle pain." In another interview she reveals that she sometimes puts cigarettes out on her arms. When asked if it hurts she replies, "No. You get this endorphin rush. You can actually faint from pain. It takes a second, a little sting, and then it's like you really don't feel anything. It's calming actually." In a Rolling Stone interview she explains where each scar came from. When she was angry about "not looking very good" Christina heated up a lighter and held it to her hand to impress some boys.
Scratches on her forearms come from fingernails and soda tops. She explains, "It's like having a drink. But it's quicker.
You know how your brain shuts down from pain? The pain would be so bad, it would force my body to slow down, and I wouldn't be as anxious. It made me calm." Christina also suffered from anorexia at one point in her teenage years.
She says, "In a way, I was trying to get rid of my breasts. Everyone my age wanted them, so it was like, whoo-ooo. Then I started hating them. And for all of my movies, I was supposed to be younger, so I'd have to strap them down."
Today, looking back at her self-injury, Christina says, "when I was younger, I did self-mutilate. I'd be upset, so I'd do it, and it would calm me down. It's a horrible way to feel better. But there are two parts of your brain- one that really wants to destroy the other. And sometimes the idea of self-destruction is very romantic. I got over that."
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of "Prozac Nation" and "Bitch," was born on July 31, 1967, in the middle of the Summer of Love. Her parents divorced before she turned two, and her father would sleep through all her visits. Her mother was over-protective and usually enemployed. She describes herself as being a "golden girl" until she turned eleven, a time when she first broke down.
"When I was ten or eleven, I really cracked up, started hiding in the locker room at school, crying for hours, or walking around the corridors saying, Everything is plastic, we're all gonna die anyway, so why does anything matter? I'd read this phrase in a picture of some graffiti in a magazine article about punk rock, which I decided was definitely a great invention. When I stopped talking, stopped eating, stopped going to school, and started spending my time cutting my legs up with razor blades while listening to dumb rock music like Foreigner on a little Panasonic tape recorder, my parents agreed I needed psychiatric help. To make a very long and complicated story short, my mom found a therapist for me, my dad didn't like him and kept trying to sneak me off to others, I never got terribly effective treatment, my father refused to file an insurance claim for the psychiatrist I was seeing, and the whole scenario concluded with me as messed up as ever, but with all the adults involved suing one another. My mom sued my dad for unpaid alimony and child support, my psychiatrist sued my dad for unpaid bills, and after years of lawyers everywhere, my father finally fled to Florida when I was fourteen years old and did not turn up in my life again until my freshman year at Harvard."
Elizabeth was clinically depressed. During her college years she had a series of breakdowns and drug abuse. Finally, she attempted to kill herself in her psychiatrist's bathroom and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. She began taking Prozac, one of the first individuals to take Prozac. She tells how it helped her, "Something just kind of changed in me...I became all right, safe in my own skin...One morning I woke up, and I really did want to live...The black wave, for the most part, is gone. On a good day, I don't even think about it any more."
Elizabeth has written a memoir of her struggles, "Prozac Nation," and a book that describes the history of manipulative female behavior, "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women." She has written articles and for various newspapers and magazines.
Elizabeth Wurtzel describes her cutting, in much better words than I would be able to do:
"I guess the cutting began when I started to spend my lunch period hiding in the girls' locker room, scared to death of everybody around me. I would bring my functional black and silver Panasonic, meant for voice recording and not music, and I would listen intently to the scratchy sounds of the tapes I'd accumulated, mostly popular hard rock like Foreigner, which, trashy as it was, sounded like liberation to me. I'd sit there with my tape recorder, eating cottage cheese and pineapples from a stout thermos I brought from home (I was, by this time, also certain that I was fat), and it was a peaceful relief from having to deal with other people, whether they were teachers or friends. Every so often, I would sit in the locker room on the floor, leaning against the concrete wall while my tape recorder sat on the bench, and I would fantasize about going back to the person I had always been. The reverse transformation couldn't be that much of a leap. I could just try talking to people again. I could get the astonished look off my face, as if my eyes had just been exposed to a terrible glare. I could laugh a bit. I would imagine myself doing the things I once did, like playing tennis. Every so often I would make a decision, first thing in the morning as I headed out the door for the school bus, that I was going to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that day; I would be friendly, I would smile, I would raise my hand in math class from time to time. I remember those days, because I could see how my friends got this look of relief on their faces. I would walk toward them, standing in a huddle in the blue-carpeted hall outside of the classroom, and they would half expect me to say something like 'Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die' and instead I would just say, Good Morning, And suddenly, their bodies would relax, their shoulders would drop comfortably, and sometimes they would even say, Oh wow, you're the old Lizzy again, kind of like a parent who has finally accepted that his oldest son has become a Shiite Muslim and is moving to Iran when, suddenly, the kid returns home and announces that he wants to go to law school after all. My friends, and my mother for that matter, would be relieved to find that I was more the me they wanted me to be. The trouble was, I thought this alternative persona I had adopted was just that: a put-on, a way of getting attention, a way of being different. And maybe when I first started walking around talking about plastic and death, maybe then it was an experiment. But after a while, the alternative me really just was me. Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. I went home at night and cried for hours because so many people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I'd been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions I couldn't quite answer any longer. I remember being in a panic one day at school when I realized that I could not even fake being the old Lizzy anymore. I had, indeed, metamorphosed into this nihilistic, unhappy girl. Just like Gregor Samsa waking up to find he'd become a six foot long roach, only in my case, I had invented the monster and now it was overtaking me. This was what I'd come to. This was what I'd be for the rest of my life. Things were bad now and would get worse later. They would. I had not heard the word depression yet, and would not for some time after that, but I felt something very wrong going on. I felt that I was wrong - my hair was wrong, my face was wrong, my personality was wrong - my God, my choice of flavors at the Haagan Dazs shop after school was wrong! How could I walk around with such pasty white skin, such dark, doleful eyes, such straight anemic hair, such round hips and such a small clinched waist? How could I let anybody see me this way? How could I expose other people to my person, to this bane to the world? I was one big mistake. And so, sitting in the locker room, petrified that I was doomed to spend my life hiding from people this way, I took my keys out of my knapsack. On the chain was a sharp nail clipper, which had a nail file attached to it. I rolled down my knee socks (we were required to wear skirts to school) and looked at my bare white legs. I hadn't really started shaving yet, only from time to time because my mother considered me too young, and I looked at the delicate peach fuzz, still soft and untainted. A perfect, clean canvas. So I took the nail file, found its sharp edge, and ran it across my lower leg, watching a red line of blood appear across my skin. I was surprised at how straight the line was and at how easy it was for me to hurt myself in this way. It was almost fun. I was always the sort to pick scabs and peel sunburned skin in sheets off my shoulders, always pestering my body. This was just the next step. And how much more satisfying it was to muck up my own body than relying on mosquitoes and walks in the country among thorny bushes to do it for me. I made a few more scratches, alternating between legs, this time moving the file more quickly, less cautiously. I did not, you see, want to kill myself. Not at that time, anyway. But I wanted to know that if need be, if the desperation got so terribly bad, I could inflict harm on my body. And I could. Knowing this gave me a sense of peace and power, so I started cutting up my legs all the time. Hiding the scars from my mother became a sport of its own. I collected razor blades, I bought a Swiss Army knife, I became fascinated with different kinds of sharp edges and the different cutting sensations they produced. I tried out different shapes - squares, triangles, pentagons, even an awkwardly carved heart, with a stab wound at its center, wanting to see if it hurt the way a real broken heart could hurt. I was amazed and pleased to find that it didn't."
All Information from: http://www.self-injury.net/