Self-Harm With Better PR

It is emotionally exhausting to be this self-aware and still this mentally unwell… to have the vocabulary, the insight, the clinical understanding, and yet remain trapped inside the behavior anyway. To know exactly what I’m doing while I’m doing it. To feel the pattern click into place like a familiar lock and still slide the key in myself. I can name it as it happens, narrate it in real time, predict the ending, and still walk straight toward it. I am not just the victim of my own mind; I am also a witness to my own crimes. I watch myself self-sabotage with clarity and precision, like standing behind glass while my body moves on instinct alone. Worse than that, I archive it. I annotate the damage. I take the pain, lay it out neatly like evidence on a stainless steel table, and turn it into something beautiful enough to survive being looked at. I don’t flinch from the blood; I arrange it. I soften the edges just enough that others can touch it without recoiling. There is something deeply unsettling about being conscious through your own unraveling, about knowing you are bleeding and choosing to make art instead of applying pressure, because the wound feels more honest than the healing ever has.

There is nothing mystical about writing, not really. There’s no divine spark, no whispered secret passed down to the worthy. No magic trick waiting to be unlocked. You don’t stumble into it; you consent to it. All you do is sit down with intention and allow yourself to bleed, to hold the blade steady instead of flinching away. You choose the incision, trace it slowly, deliberately, knowing exactly what it will cost you. You choose how deep you’re willing to go, how much you can afford to lose that day. You decide which wounds deserve air and light and which ones are still too feral, too volatile to survive exposure. Some scars are safe to touch. Others will bite if named too soon. People romanticize art as creation, as something birthed whole and glowing, but most days it feels more like confession… hands shaking, voice cracking, telling the truth without absolution. Or an autopsy, cutting into what’s already dead just to understand how it failed. It’s just self-harm with better PR: the same blood, the same ache, just dressed up as something noble enough to be applauded instead of stopped.

The worst part about anything self-destructive is how intimate it is, how quietly it slips into your life and begins to feel like a furniture piece instead of a wound. These behaviors don’t arrive screaming or violent; they arrive gently, offering relief, offering structure, offering a way through the dark when nothing else shows up. They feel familiar. They feel like home, the kind you return to even when you know it’s unsafe, because at least you know where everything is. You grow close to your illnesses the way you grow close to a companion in crisis, memorizing their moods, learning their rhythms, letting them teach you how to survive when no one else knew what you needed. They hold you together when you are splintering. They keep you breathing when the alternative feels unbearable. So when it comes time to leave them behind, it doesn’t feel like healing; it feels like betrayal. Like abandoning the only thing that stayed by your side all this time. Like killing the part of yourself that kept watch through the long nights when no one else did. Healing, then, isn’t just growth, relief, or light breaking in; it’s grief. It’s standing at the grave of the version of yourself who endured at any cost and admitting that survival, too, had a price.

There is a strange kind of stability in self-destruction, a predictable gravity that pulls you back to the same place no matter how far you wander. It has rules. It has weight. You know how it ends. Prolonging sadness can feel safer than reaching for abstractions like happiness or peace… ideas that sound delicate, conditional, easily revoked. Happiness feels like borrowed light, something you’re always waiting to be asked to return. Sadness, at least, feels earned. They don’t tell you that rock bottom is a surprisingly comfortable place to rest your head, not because it’s painless, but because it’s familiar. You know the terrain down there. You know where the sharp edges are and which ones will cut if you move too fast. You know exactly how much it will hurt, and there is a strange mercy in that certainty. Looking up from the depths of another love, another loss, often feels safer than standing somewhere high with nothing beneath you but hope, wondering when gravity will remember you again. Falling feels awful, bones shattering, breath leaving your body all at once, but anticipating the fall is its own kind of torture, a constant vertigo, a life lived braced for the inevitable  impact.

There is also a particular kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it actually is once the stories stop working. It’s what happens when the illusion peels away and you’re left staring at the machinery underneath… cold, indifferent, unromantic. You begin to notice how little of life is cinematic and how much of it is quiet, repetitive, almost forgettable. The grief lives in that awareness: the understanding that life is not a sweeping, meaningful adventure with a carefully written arc, but a series of small, often insignificant moments stacked on top of each other and called a lifetime. No swelling soundtrack. No guaranteed redemption waiting in the final act. Just getting up, enduring, trying again. Coffee going cold. Conversations that trail off unfinished. Love that flickers in brief, breathtaking flashes before disappearing back into the noise. Tenderness arrives like a breath you didn’t know you were holding, then leaves just as quickly, and you’re left chasing the echo of it, wishing it would stay long enough to make sense of everything else.

Nietzsche once said, “Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering.” To live is to suffer; that much feels undeniable. But to survive is to carve meaning out of that suffering, to press your hands into the ache and ask it to become something you can carry. I think that’s why so many of us cling to pain; we understand its language. Pain gives us structure, gives us a reason, gives us a story that makes sense of the chaos. We know how to make it matter. We can point to it and say, this is why I am the way I am. Healing, on the other hand, often arrives empty-handed. It doesn’t come with a script or a promise of transcendence. It doesn’t explain itself. It just shows up quietly and asks you to keep going anyway, even when there’s no lesson to extract, no meaning to mine, no proof that all of this was worth it.

What they don’t tell you is that healing will make you angry, not in a clean or righteous way, but in a way that rattles your bones and rearranges the furniture inside you. No one warns you about that part… the way anger creeps in quietly, disguised as irritation, as bitterness, as a sudden tightness in your chest you can’t name. Anger is the one emotion I avoid at all costs. I treat it like a loaded weapon, something I keep locked away because I’ve seen what it can do when it goes off in the wrong direction. Anger is a secondary emotion, born from fear, from grief, from shame, and old, unhealed hurt. It exists to protect, to draw a line in the sand, to say enough, but it is also fire, and fire doesn’t discriminate. I don’t like feeling angry because I know what it has the power to take from me if I let it run unchecked… relationships, softness, the parts of myself I worked so hard to keep gentle in a world that never was.

But there is no avoiding anger if you’re healing honestly; it rises whether you invite it or not, like a tide that has been held back for years and finally finds a crack in the wall. I believe that if you’re on a healing journey and you never feel angry, you haven’t gone deep enough, you’ve stayed in the shallow water where survival still feels safer than truth. Beneath survival lives a rage that has been waiting patiently, quiet and coiled, watching you endure what should never have been yours to carry. Rage builds the moment you realize how much of your life was shaped by someone else’s dysfunction, how many of your instincts were forged in chaos instead of choice. When you start to see that what you call your personality is often just muscle memory from living on high alert. When you recognize that so many of your “decisions” were never really decisions at all, but emergency exits… coping mechanisms dressed up as agency, survival strategies mistaken for identity.

And when you finally see it, really see it, when you stop flinching away and let yourself feel it fully, it isn’t pretty or poetic or contained. It’s volcanic. It erupts without permission, hot and chaotic, scattering ash over everything you thought you had neatly organized. It’s disorienting, like the ground shifting under your feet after years of standing still. It cracks things open that were carefully sealed for decades… old memories, old loyalties, old lies you told yourself just to keep breathing. As much as I avoid anger, it’s necessary here, because this kind of anger isn’t cruelty or recklessness, it’s clarity. It’s the moment your nervous system finally screams instead of whispering, This isn’t safe yet, the moment your body speaks the truth your mind has been negotiating away for years.

Boundaries are born from this anger, not gently, but like fences hammered into the ground with shaking hands. Standards form in real time, carved out of necessity, not politeness, not fear of being too much. This is not the end of healing… not the triumphant moment where everything clicks and you emerge whole and unscarred. The anger is only the beginning. It is the fire that moves through the wreckage, burning down every false belief you were handed before you had the language or safety to refuse them, the beliefs that taught you to stay quiet, to stay small, to be grateful for harm because it was familiar. It clears the ground in a way nothing else can. And standing there, surrounded by ash and open space, you are given something you never had before: the ability to choose. Not to survive. Not to adapt. But to decide, for yourself, what is allowed to remain.

Maybe that’s what healing actually is… not becoming softer, not becoming kinder, not sanding yourself down into something more palatable for the world. Maybe healing is becoming honest enough to feel everything that was postponed for the sake of survival, all the grief, rage, fear, and longing you packed away so you could keep going. It’s reopening the rooms you sealed shut because you couldn’t afford to fall apart back then, and standing in them now without running. And maybe the bravest part isn’t the feeling itself, but what comes after, the decision to live once the feeling has passed, to keep breathing in a body that no longer needs to be armored, to step forward without the old defenses even when there’s no guarantee it will be safe. Healing isn’t gentleness; it’s courage. It’s choosing life after you’ve finally told yourself the truth.