Whenever I felt frustrated as a child, I remember ‘scratching myself’. I don’t really know why. Maybe it was in response to teachers talking to me harshly or my not managing homework, a kind of light relief from feelings of guilt or inadequacy. Maybe it was out of boredom, as if once I’d started I couldn’t stop. I remember tugging sweater sleeves down across my knuckles to cover the scrappy scars on my hands and wrists.
The self-mutilation started when I was eleven and continued sporadically through my teens. It would go away, and then come back when I had an intense period of depression; it was especially bad during my early twenties. After I met Jason, the compulsion stopped for about eight years, then returned when we moved to Cape Town during my early thirties.
Coming down painfully from four glorious months of summer mania once – I was about twenty-two or twenty-three – I felt isolated from the world. Back then, as soon as I felt the first tingling of mania, I’d throw out whichever boyfriend I was involved with. One Friday afternoon, feeling chaotic and bad, intimidated by the lack of reality in my life, I smashed a glass tumbler in the kitchen and started jabbing at the skin on my right hand, on the side of my palm. I cut and cut until finally I grew bored and bemused by the streams of blood. I wrapped my hand in an old T-shirt.
Later that night, outside the apartment, I bumped into a drunken neighbour who claimed to be a doctor and asked about my hand. She was also schizophrenic, gay and allegedly a devout Jew. She bandaged me up and we had a strange, drunken Shabbat dinner. I don’t believe she really was a doctor, because I’ve still got the scar. It was a deep wound and should have had stitches. But she was cool, she was kind of gentle and, I suppose, she was too ‘out there’ herself to judge me.
The urge to self-mutilate vanished again as mysteriously as it had come, and for years there were no further incidents – a suicide attempt, yes, but no carving at my flesh.
Then, many years later, I was in hospital waiting for my husband Jason and to see the doctor. I’d been checked in the night before and had awoken at 6 a.m., bemused and horrified. The nursing staff couldn’t give me any medication to calm me down until the doctor arrived. As ever, I desperately needed to be close to Jason and to be reassured by him.
I lay on a narrow bed in a sterile private ward. My breakfast, a plastic tray of inedible hospital food, lay next to me. There were no metal implements (never trust a psychiatric patient), so with deliberate calm I began to jab away at my right hand with a toothpick. My right side always takes the cuts, because I’m left-handed.
Jason used to have an absurd theory that you could murder a person with a toothpick. You can’t. But you can dig, and you can dig quite far into the flesh before the toothpick mashes into split ends. And you can draw a reasonable amount of blood, creatively causing yet another whitening line of scar tissue.
I have no intimate or detailed recollection of these events. No dates, times, awareness or integrated reminiscences. My mind reveals only a fuzzy patchwork of other people’s accounts of events, combined with the feathery white scars that map their way across my skin like rivers. So much took place when I wasn’t quite there. It happened to another girl, who had nothing to do with me.
Sometimes, when I’m climbing out of the bath, I’ll catch a glimpse of a jagged line etched somewhere on my body. These lines don’t fade, despite the application of lotions and potions. I can’t rub them away with vitamin E oil; they’re tattooed on my skin, obstinate reminders of times I’d rather forget. When I see them I’m startled, taken aback by surprise. How did they get there? Amnesia is a gracious gift.
When I first tried to write about my self-mutilation, the narrative didn’t come across in my own voice. Instead, I wrote in a detached, journalistic tone. That’s not really surprising. These things happened to me as if in a dream, without conscious volition or decision. I no longer inhabited my own body. My frightened spirit had stepped outside of it in revulsion and now looked down from a giddy height. An astral traveller staring at a horror movie – scenes you can watch as entertainment because it is all happening to someone else, somewhere else. No one should have to write about self-mutilation. It goes against the human condition.
Stepping out of my body and looking down on it has been a recurrent theme in my life. Sometimes I did so in revulsion, sometimes in bliss. When I was younger and dancing regularly, there were days when hours of stretching and torturing my body would suddenly wake it to a life entirely its own. With the grace of a bird in free flight, possessed and impervious to my own exhaustion, my body would pirouette perfectly from one end of the studio to the other. My spirit hovered above me, gazing down in delight as a strange, mythical semblance of my physical self spun unhindered around the confines of the real world. It was a glorious sensation, but I feared that if I allowed this to happen too often and for too long, my spirit would become dislodged, even unhinged, from my body, and I would probably die.
Shortly after Valentine’s Day, when I was thirty-three, I sat quivering in bed, staring at the strawberry bush Jason had given me as a romantic gift. It was now wilting pathetically, withering away. I couldn’t bear the symbolic connection between the bush and me. The day had started with vigorous self-medication. A panic attack that refused to chill was abated with a combination of Xanor, Valium and Ativan (some pretty addictive tranquillisers).
The combination of drugs, along with stress, brought on a pounding headache, so I took a couple of analgesics. Self-medicating is a tricky business, particularly when orchestrated by the layman. My mood continued to lash out at me uninhibited, despite the medication, so I slid into a dangerous cocktail of drugs, downed recklessly: Xanor, Stopain, Imovane, Valium, Ativan, painkillers, Stilnox and Aropax.
That night Jason’s producer came over with a video and a take-out dinner. Displaying a profound lack of insight – or a madness that rivalled mine – the film she brought was Iris, about the mental decline of the writer Iris Murdoch as her doting husband desperately cared for her. Although I didn’t watch the movie, I’d read the reviews and knew what it was about. To me, the producer seemed to be implying that I was a manipulative female who was in control of what I was doing and willingly destroying my husband’s life and art. I knew I wouldn’t be able to watch the film with them, so I was left alone, which I perceived as being abandoned.
Every ten minutes, Jason would excuse himself from the film and run downstairs to confirm the beating of my broken heart. I was pretty out there, over-medicated, spinning and spinning out of my tree, spinning out of the entire forest. I convinced myself that the guest would come and check up on me, so I locked myself inside my cupboard. I threw every item of clothing I possessed onto the floor and chaotically began a frenzy of obsessive–compulsive folding, arranging everything into perfectly measured, colour-coded, categorised piles.
Upstairs, I could hear the tormenting chatter and laughter of an army. I needed Jason’s comfort but couldn’t risk calling him, couldn’t risk having traffic with the talking, laughing enemy in my lounge, which seemed to have been invaded and was now an enemy camp. I was hiding out in the trenches of my dressing room.
Perhaps I was desperate for evidence of illness, a physical manifestation of what was happening to me, to externalise the chaos running rampant within, as though proof of pain would provide relief from it. I ventured nervously out of the cupboard and into the bedroom in search of a sharp object. Jason, no fool, had hidden everything except my Diet Coke can.
I took the tab you pull to open the can and began to cut away at my calf. When the blood started pouring too profusely for my squeamish nerves, I began to panic. Band-Aids, stored upstairs in the kitchen, were being held hostage in the enemy camp. One moment I was blotting and bandaging my leg with a precious cashmere sweater, and the next I resumed cutting, this time on the thigh of my other leg. Finally, my body exhausted, the cocktail of drugs kicked in, and I passed out onto a heap of neatly folded clothes on the floor.
When Jason saw the state I was in, he called my GP, who, unaware of all the medication I’d already taken, shot me up with Pethidine and Feldene. Half of this cocktail would normally sink a battleship. Yet, once awake, I remained overwrought and full of manic energy, tingling in wide-eyed desperation. One feature of psychosis is how impervious it is to medication. Nothing works. Ironically, nowadays I shy away from alcohol and tartrazine because of their toxicity.
Sunday morning, when my GP returned to tell Jason that he thought I’d be safest in hospital, I was pretty cut up. When Jason looked at me, he knew he was looking not at the face of his beloved wife, but into the face of madness. Swirling, swarming fear was trapped behind my eyes.
Once admitted to hospital, I continued to find inventive ways of cutting myself, as the ever-increasing dosage of medication continued to have little or no effect. Psychosis is nothing if not resilient.
I haven’t cut myself for a long time. As I look out at the sunny begonias in the garden and relish the fragrance of freesias in a vase, I can’t imagine myself doing such a tawdry, destructive thing again. It made no sense then, and it makes no sense now.
I flinch at the sight of my scars. I turn away from a movie screen to avoid the sight of blood in a film. I could barely bring myself to see Iris then, but when I finally watched that brilliant writer disintegrating into senile dementia, right from the opening moments to the closing credits I had a metallic taste in my mouth – the taste of shame and fear.
Scars heal – if not all the external ones, certainly the internal ones. Time, love, Mr Thomas Waits and fresh flowers are some of what it takes. Life conspires to heal me.