There is a study that claims the teenage brain develops at the rate of a baby’s brain—which is to say, the fastest rate it will ever grow. The difference the second time around is that you are both physically mobile and mentally more aware. You know that something is happening within you but not within your control. This is your new body, you’re told, but don’t touch it. Don’t use it yet. It’s dangerous. It’s not finished cooking.
The frontal cortex, where logic resides, is busy mapping a route to the amygdala, that gumball-sized emotional center in the brain’s core that still leads the teenager’s decision-making process without mediation. Feelings override reason. There is only instinct and the sparkling sensation of epiphany. You are a genius; you are an animal. You are a walking fetish—a child in adult prosthetics. You are a sensationalized news story. (“Shocking transformation: Underage teen sprouts sex organs.”) You are hideous. You are alarming. You are famous. All around you, they purr and coo, they psst. Your body brings out the worst in them—fear for your safety, fear of their own perversions. You can read their minds.
For these reasons and others, teenagers are human oddities. Everyone is watching them, or it feels that way, because of the flood of oxytocin, but also because everyone is watching them. Corporate entities have deemed them mystics, tapping their cultural prognostications and rapturous tendencies to fuel economic growth. Courtrooms, doctors, and parental figures have labeled the same tendencies satanic, idiotic, dangerous, or borderline.
What we know is that teenagers are capable of anything—from setting Olympic records to suicide—and when they recognize the extent of their newfound potential, they are primed, biologically, to act on it.
This may be why the doctor told me to wear a rubber band on my wrist and snap it whenever I felt the urge to cut. He was bargaining with my teen brain—which couldn’t be talked out of its cravings, only talked into alternative methods of relief.
I began cutting at fourteen and entered treatment the following year, after my mother saw the marks on my arms as I dressed for school. By that point, the cuts had become so much a part of my skin I’d forgotten they might be alarming. I didn’t even know why I’d made them. But when someone asks you for a reason, you’re expected to provide an answer.
In case studies, adolescents have cited stress relief, the desire to feel something, and self-punishment. There is a theory that self-injurers have decreased opioid receptors and the pain stimulates opioid production. Another claims self-harm releases euphoria-producing endorphins. If this is true, cutting isn’t like an addiction, it is an addiction—something to which teenage brains are particularly susceptible.
“My mind slows down, I stop crying, and I just feel better,” a fifteen-year-old girl explained in a 2008 case study on self-harm, published in the journal Psychiatry. Later she was asked by a psychiatrist what coping mechanism she used before she discovered cutting. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never hurt then like I do now.”
Since the nineties, rates of adolescent self-injury have spiked as high as 38 percent, though that could be attributed to raised awareness. Back when I started, nobody talked about it. There wasn’t even a name for it outside medical journals. I first heard the term cutting, after I’d mostly stopped, on a 1998 episode of Beverly Hills 90210, when Donna Martin’s assistant revealed the cuts on her arm and muttered something about not being a supermodel. This was enough to put me off the practice. It was all so silly, so melodramatic. Just another weird thing girls do for attention.
The myth that cutters do it for attention isn’t surprising considering the higher prevalence of the practice among adolescent and teenage girls. The explanation that “girls crave attention” has been used for almost every broken taboo adults can’t or don’t want to understand. If anything, many girls at that age feel too scrutinized and search for ways to counterbalance the attention they’re receiving.
For me, cutting was a secret I knew better than to flaunt—bleeding is supposed to be prevented, not stimulated. But the hidden nature of the act was also part of the appeal. I had something separate from others—an intimate way to commune with my own body, its limitations and potential. And more than that, I was reclaiming my body, which had begun to feel like it didn’t belong to me. It was always being inspected, judged, explained, warned against, praised, feared, perfected, touched, and protected from touch.
Cutting began as an act of revenge on a body that didn’t belong to me anymore, but it became a reminder that this same body could bring me relief.
I was easing out the air pressure—the way you do with a bottle of seltzer before you open it so it doesn’t explode. I was building up my pain threshold to do away with the little girl who was so afraid of everything. I was punishing myself, punishing others—whoever deserved it. I deserved it. Little fucking rich girl with everything. Ungrateful selfish bitch. Each phrase matched to a notch on my skin, each notch a mark of forgiveness. A meditation on violence, a sacrifice to mitigate the harm I wished on others, a ritual to both feed an emotional restlessness and prevent it from boiling over.
This is not what I told the doctor. Instead, I told him what happened at tennis camp the summer of 1993, three months after Gary Wilensky had died.
At camp, there were three popular boys from New York City. They knew Bianca. I’d hoped by the end of summer they’d know me, too.
Camp was at a resort in Florida. To stay cool, we hunted for shadows on the court. We filled up little paper cones with water until they softened into tissues. We swam in an Olympic-sized pool, surrounded by deck chairs splayed with the ghosts of our parents, who’d vacationed at this resort in cooler months.
The three boys were nice the first day, until I made a mistake.
“It’s so hot I could take my shirt off,” said the tall boy, pinching the Stussy logo on his shirt and pulling it away from his stomach.
“Please don’t,” I said, because I was nervous, and my mouth was so eager to impress them with my comedic timing that my brain couldn’t stop it in time.
It was too late—I’d disrespected the tall boy, maybe even pressed a tender wound. But I believe it was less what I’d said, and more that I had said it—a girl who was physically beneath them, even if she was Bianca’s friend. The next day they began teaching me my place.
“Hey, Piper,” yelled one boy from across the tennis court. I waved. “You look like a witch.”
“I can see your pubic hair,” another said by the pool.
They blocked the door to my room and tossed me between each other, grabbing at my chest. “Where are your tits? I can’t find them!” At night, they would call the telephone in my room to tell me how they planned to rape me. They’d brought a gun to camp, I was warned.
I called my mother, as I always did, who called the head of the tennis camp, but encouraged me to stick it out.
“Be tough,” she said. And this was when I discovered the knives in the butcher block behind my eyes. A whole selection of them to use on each boy in my mind. The gore was detailed, their cries of pain, delightfully scripted each night before I fell asleep. When I returned to New York, I told my mother I was tough. I was: I started cutting myself harder, deeper and closer to the vein, to prove that I was tougher than anyone thought. To cut them out of me. To protect myself.
To treat this situation, there was medication and the rubber band on the wrist, and a shame that came with being so seen, so classifiable. My story wasn’t unique, nor were my various ever-shifting diagnoses—depression, anxiety and depression, borderline. The doctor said these kinds of impulses subside by the time you turn thirty. And eventually there was a tapering off—the need to cut overruled by the need to avoid broadcasting my issues each time I was naked with someone. But the actual impulse never completely went away.
Even now, when I think of those nights, hiding behind an armchair in my teenage bedroom—the pinch and swell of a dull kitchen knife, the sacredness of the ritual I’d invented—I almost wish I could feel it again.